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BECKONINGS FOR EVERY DAY. A Collection of 

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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY', 

Boston and New York. 



BECKONINGS 

A CALENDAR OF THOUGHT 



ARRANfftlD BY 

LUCY LARCOM 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

i886 



Copyright, 1886, 
By LUCY LARCOM. 

All rights reserved. 



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The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H, 0. Houghton & Co. 



MONTHS AND THEMES. 



January . 
February- 
March 
April . 
May . 
June . 
July . 
August 
September 
October . 
November 
December 



. The Invisible Presence . . 6 

. Our Work 24 

. Our Neighbor 41 

. Nature and Ourselves ... 59 

. Sunbeam and Shadow ... 77 

. Blossom-Time 96 

. Freedom, Beauty, and Poetry 114 

. Toward the Heights . . . 130 

. Heart unto Heart .... 149 

. Among the Sheaves .... 168 

. Heaven-Life on Earth . . . 183 

. Within the Yeil 203 



INTRODUCTORY. 



This little volume is not wholly dissimilar in 
idea from others of the kind which have been 
issued from year to year; yet it has features 
sufficiently distinctive to give it a reason for 
being. It grew up in the arranger's mind from 
a desire to share with others thoughts which had 
given uplift and enlargement to her own life, and 
the work seemed more and more worth doing as 
it went on. Such a book, to be really valuable, 
must be a growth, and scarcely a rapid one : 
this has been taken up as a pleasant side-occupa- 
tion during two or three years ; and has been 
in itself a refreshing and stimulating compan- 
ionship. 

Aiming, as its title suggests, to give some of 
the most awakening and inspiring words of the 
great and good in all ages, there are naturally 
many familiar passages ; not a few, perhaps, 
which have appeared in other compilations ; yet 
it is believed that the amount of fresh material 
hitherto unappropriated in this way is unusually 
large, 



2 INTRODUCTORY. 

The effort has been to enter into the spirit of 
modern thought and aspiration, and also to show 
how the best expressions of the best minds of ear- 
lier and later times harmonize in the truth. Poet 
and philosopher and Christian thinker, speaking 
from their deepest insight, strike the same key- 
note, and meet in one concord of eternal verities. 

And it is wonderful to see and to feel how all 
high thought converges, as the ray to the centre, 
in the highest Christian thought — that of the 
Divine Humanity, the Presence of the Son of 
God in the world. 

Believers are perhaps too ready to satisfy 
themselves with the consolations of their faith, 
forgetting that its real power is in its imceasing 
upward call. It is not good for us to breathe 
always the soft atmosphere of the valley, how- 
ever soothing it may be : the bracing air of 
spiritual heights strengthens the soul to ascend 
towards the grandeur of its immortal destiny. 
The saint were scarcely a saint, if he were not 
also capable of more than earthly heroisms ; and 
the leading endeavor has been to keep in sight 
this loftier aspect of Christianity, which is as 
much more nobl/ human as it is deeply and in- 
tensely Christian. 

The thought that all truth is Divine truth, and 
that all real life is Eternal Life, is more deeply 
impressing itself upon the heart and soul of our 
age than of any preceding ; and herein is deep 



INTRODUCTORY. 3 

ground for gratitude and prophetic hope. What 
poetry and philosophy had announced, Revela* 
tion has confirmed, with an ever-widening out- 
look through illimitable vistas. 

The arrangement of subjects under the differ- 
ent months has necessarily been in some degree 
arbitrary ; but it was thought that something of 
coherence would make the book more useful to 
the reader. 

If honored names among the living and the 
departed are often repeated, it is because to them 
have been committed larger measures of that 
truth which belongs to all the world, because it is 
of God. 

The compiler has connected these groups of 
thought by a thread of her own, from month to 
month ; but credit has been given for everything 
not original by quotation-marks where unknown, 
or by the names of known authors. 

L. L. 

Beverly, Mass, June, 1886. 



THE NEW YEAR. 



Behold, the New Year beckons, like a flower 
Hid in its roots among the untrodden hills : 

God show thee how its sweetness every hour 
Grows only as His breath thy spirit fills ! 

Behold, the New Year beckons, like a star, 
A splendid mystery of the unf athomed skies : 

God guide thee through His mystic spaces far, 
Till all His stars as suns within thee rise ! 

The New Year beckons. He too, beckoning, nears ; 

Forget not thou that all its gifts are His ! 
Take from His hand all blessings of the years, 

And of the blossoming, starred eternities ! 



FIRST MONTH. 



The year opens with a beauty of its own. Its 
gateway is crystal; its threshold is garnished 
with the tints of all manner of precious stones= 
In the glittering pendants over doorway and 
window, in the iridescence of ice-hung trees, we 
catch the changeful hues of blossoms, fountains, 
blue skies, and rainbows, hidden within this white 
gate, in the summer that is yet far away, a 
promise unfulfilled. 

And in this wonder of blended purity and 
color, this splendor which transfigures the famil- 
iar landscape, other visions flash upon us, — the 
illumination of the unseen, — 

^' A glimpse of glory infinite — 
The f oregleam of the Holy City 

Like that to him of Patmos given ; 

The white bride coming down from heaven." 

" The twelve gates were twelve pearls ; every 
several gate was of one pearl." By each of our 
months we enter upon a distinct and beautiful 
revelation of this world, which was meant to be 
the City of the Living God. The gateways that 
let in the cool of the north, the balm of the south, 
the glow of the east, and the tenderness of the 
west, — winter, spring, summer, autumn, — each 



6 



BECKONING S. 



brings earth its own peculiar charm. It is the 
same world, yet without sameness, seen through 
a halo of infinitely-varying beauty. 

Light is life. Alike in the visible and spirit- 
ual worlds, it is the one primal element of being. 
Through luminous gateways opening all around 
us, the soul passes on into glory which no eye 
hath seen or can see — into the nearer Presence 
of Him who is Light ; in whom "is no darkness 
at aU." 



JANUARY, 
THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 

1 January. There is something in the hu- 
man mind which makes it know that in all finite 
quantity there is an infinite, in all measure of 
time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, 
the substance, the true and abiding reality, of 
the former ; and that as we truly are only as far 
as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess 
(that is, enjoy) our being, or any other real good, 
but by living in the sense of His holy presence. 

S. T. COLERIDaE. 

There is a Height higher than mortal thought ; 

There is a Love warmer than mortal love ; 

There is a Life which taketh not its hues 

From Earth or earthly things, and so grows pure, 

And higher than the petty cares of men, 

And is a blessed life and glorified. Edwin Mobbis. 

2 January, Man's unhappiness, as I con- 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 7 

strue, comes of his greatness : it is because there 
is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning 
he cannot quite bury under the finite. 

Thomas Carlyle. 

Are there not aspirations in each heart 

After a better, brighter world than this ; — 

Longings for beings nobler in each part. 

Things more exalted, steeped in deeper bliss ? 

Who gave us these ? What are they ? Soul, in 
thee 

The bud is budding now for immortality ! 

Robert Nicoll. 

3 January. A divine discontent is wrought 
into us, — divine, because it attends our highest 
faculties. 

The repose of the greater spirits is not acquies- 
cence in the allotments of time, but the conscious 
possession of eternal life. t. t. Mungeh. 

I hear it often in the dark, — 

I hear it in the light, — 
Where is the voice that calls to me 

With such a quiet might ? 
It seems but echo to my thought, 

And yet beyond the stars : 
It seems a heart-beat in a hush, 

And yet the planet jars ! 

Oh, may it be that far within 

My inmost soul there lies 
A spirit-sky, that opens with 

Those voices of surprise ? 



8 BECKOXINGS. 

And can it be, by night and day, 

That firmament serene 
Is just the heaven where God Himself, 

The Father, dwells unseen ? w. c. Gi^csFrr. 

4 January. The soul, in its highest sense, is 
a vast capacibi^ for God. It is like a curious 
chamber added on to being, a chamber with elas- 
tic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, 
with God as its guest, inimitably ; but which 
without God shrinks and shrivels until every ves- 
tige of the Divine is gone, and God's image is 
left without God's Spirit. — Nature has her re- 
venge upon neglect as well as upon extravagance. 
Misuse, with her, is as mortal a sin as abuse. 

Upward the soul forever turns her eyes ; 

The next hour always shames the hour before ; 
One beauty, at its highest, prophesies 

That by whose side it shall seem mean and poor. 
No God-like thing knows aught of less and less, 
But widens to the boundless Perfectness. 

James Russelx Lowell. 

5 January. Man is not placed in the world 
of sense alone, but the essential root of his being 
is in God. 

When the consciousness of the true source of 
his existence first rises upon him, and he joyfully 
resigns himself to it, till his being is steeped in 
the thought, then peace and joy and blessedness 
flow in upon his soul. And it lies in the Divine 
Idea that aU men must come to this gladden- 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 9 

ing consciousness, — that the outward and taste- 
less finite life may be pervaded by the Infinite, 
and so enjoyed ; and to this end all who have 
been filled with the Divine Idea have labored 
and shall still labor, — that this consciousness, in 
its purest possible form, may be spread through- 
out the race. Fichtb. 

" Every inward aspiration 
Is God's angel undefiled ; 
And in every ' O my Father ! ' 

Slumbers deep a ' Here, my child ! ' " 

6 January. Our lot is greater than our- 
selves, and gives to our souls a worth they would 
not else have dared to claim. Hence, the hum- 
bleness there always is in Christian dignity. 
The immortal lot infinitely transcends our poor 
deserts ; how we are to grow into the propor- 
tions of so high a life, it is wonderful to think. 
And yet, though it be above us always, — nay, 
even because it is above us, — there is something 
in it true and answering to our nature still ; so 
that, having once lived with it, we are only half 
ourselves — and that the meaner half — without 

it. James Martineau. 

No true man can live a half life when he has 
genuinely learned that it is only a half life. The 
other half, the higher half, must haunt him. 

Phillips Brooks. 

7 January. It is the one sufficient proof 
of the grandeur and awfulness of our nature, 



I 



10 BECKOI^INGS. 

that we have faith in God : for no merely finite 
being can possibly believe the infinite. 

James Maetineau. 

Oh ! what is man, great Maker of mankind, 
That Thou to him so great respect dost bear ? 

That Thou adornest him with so bright a mind, 
Makest him a king, and even an angel's peer ? 

Thou leavest Thy print in other works of thine ; 

But Thy whole image Thou in man hast writ : 
There cannot be a creature more divine, 

Except, like Thee, it should be infinite. 

Sir John Davies. 

8 January. If I were to construct one all- 
embracing argument for immortality, and were 
I to put it into one word, it would be God. 

T. T. MUNGEB. 

Yes ! in my spirit doth Thy Spirit shine, 
As shines the sunbeam in a drop of dew. 
In Thee I live and breathe, aspiring high, 
Even to the Throne of Thy Divinity : 
I am, O God, and surely Thou must be ! 

Derzhavin. 

9 January. When Christ showed us God, 
then man had only to stand at his highest and 
look up to the Infinite above him to see how 
small he was. And, always, the true way to be 
humble is not to stoop till you are smaller than 
yourself, but to stand at your real height against 
some higher nature that shall show you what the 
real smallness of your greatest greatness is. The 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 11 

first is the unreal humility that always goes about 
depreciating human nature ; the second is the 
genuine humility that always stands in love and 
adoration, glorifying God. Phillips Brooks. 

God is in all that liberates and lifts ; 

In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles. 

J. R. Lowell. 

10 January. By humility, by self-denial, by 
unworldliness, by spiritual thought, by devout 
aspiration, by silent communion with God, we 
grow into an abiding sense of eternal life. " Join 
thyself," says Augustine, " to the eternal God, 
and thou wilt be eternal.'' t. t. Hunger. 

The saint that wears heaven's brightest crown 

In deepest adoration bends : 
The weight of glory bears him down 

Then most, when most his soul ascends : 
Nearest the throne itself must be 
The footstool of humility. James Montgomery. 

11 January. Let us be men with men, and 
always children before God ; for in His eyes we 
are but children. Old age itself, in the presence 
of eternity, is but the first moment of a morn- 
ing. JOUBERT. 

Our little lives are kept in equipoise 

By opposite attractions and desires : 
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys, 

And the more noble instinct that aspires. 

H. W. Longfellow. 



12 BECKONES'GS. 

12 January. The unworldly Christian, if he 
has the true mettle of a great life in him. never 
looks away from the things of time, hut looks 
only the more piercingly into them and through 
them. He does not expect to find God heyond 
them, hut in them, and by means of them. 
these grand, unworldly souls, how majestic their 
aspirations, how solid their objects, how firm 
their sense of God ! They Hve in the present 
as a kind of eternity, never sick of it, and never 
wantinof more, but only what this simifies. 

Horace BuaHyrj.T,. 

To live, to live, is life's great joy, — to feel 

The living God within. — to look abroad. 
And. in the beauty that all things reveal. 
Still meet the living God. Roezet Lzightox. 

13 January. The place of a man before the 
pure, all-witnessing Spirit of God. and in the 
estimation of those who are heavenly-minded, 
determines his place in the world. All true rela- 
tions are eternal. p. c. Mozoomdab. 

'T is the sublime of man, 

Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole ! 
This fraternizes man; this constitutes 
Our charities and bearings. But 't is God 
Diffused through all, that doth make aU one 

whole. S. T. COLEEIDGE. 

14 January. The love of God is the love 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 13 

of goodness. The old Saxon word God is iden- 
tical with Good : God the Good One — personi- 
fied goodness. There is in that derivation not 
a niere play of words — there is deep truth. 
None loves God but he who loves good. 

F. W. Robertson. 

Souls that of His own good life partake, 
He loves as His own self ; dear as His eye 
They are to Hini : He '11 never them forsake : 
When they shall die, then God Himself shall 

die : 
They live, they live in blest eternity. 

Henry More. 

15 January. If you always remember that 
in all you do in soul or body, God stands by as 
a witness, in all your prayers and your actions 
you will not err ; and you shall have God dwell- 
ing with you. ' Epictetus. 

O Thou, who in the inaccessible depths 
Dwellest, of all central Being, and of whom 
We can see but the star-dust of Thy feet 
Left on heaven's roads ; — from world nathless 

to world, 
From firmament to firmament can we trace. 
Each soul, his individual link with Thee ! 

p. J. Bailey. 

16 January. For God made our individual- 
ity as well as our dependence ; made our apart- 
ness from Himself, that freedom should bind us 
divinely dearer to Himself, with a new and in- 



14 BECKOXINGS. 

scrutable marvel of love : for the Godhead is 
still at the root, is the making root of om* indi- 
viduality ; and the freer the man, the stronger 
the bond that binds him to Him who made his 
fi-eedom. He made our wills, and is striving to 
make them free ; for only in the perfection of our 
individuality and the freedom of our wills can 
we be altogether His children. Geobge macDonald. 

17 January. Every man who has a Chris- 
tian ideal of life finds, as it grows into his ex- 
perience, that he is driven in upon his own soul 
more and more imperatively. Secret resources 
become more and more necessary to him. Con- 
ceptions of truth grow up within him which the 
soul must develop alone. 

Men who are not c}Tiics often live, by force of 
nature, apart from their equals. They do their 
life's work better alone than they could with hu- 
man help. Such men must meet Christ in the 
^' solitary places." They have no adequate re- 
sources elsewhere. Austin Phelps. 

Mine be the reverent, listening love 

That waits all day on Thee, 
"With the service of a watchful heart 

Which no one else can see ; — 
The faith that, in a hidden way 

No other eye may know. 
Finds all its daily work prepared. 

And loves to have it so. A. l. waeixg. 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 15 

18 January. 

Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe 

Our hermit spirits dwell, and range apart ; 
Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow, 

Hues of their own, fresh borrowed from the 
heart. 

And well it is for us our God should feel 
Alone our secret throbbings : so our prayer 

May readier spring to heaven, nor spend its zeal 
On cloud-born idols of this lower air. Keble. 

19 January. Wliat we want to make us true 
men, over and above that which we bring into 
the world with us, is some sort of God-given in- 
stinct, motive, and new principle of life in us, 
which shall make us not only see the right and 
the true and the noble, but love it, and give up 
our wills and hearts to it, and find in the confes- 
sion of our weakness a strength, in the subjec- 
tion of our own wills a freedom, in the utter 
carelessness about self a self-respect, such as we 
have never known before. Chakles Kingsley. 

Man's weakness waiting upon God 

Its end can never miss ; 
For men on earth no work can do 

More angel-like than this. 

Ill that He blesses is our good, 

And unblest good is ill; 
And all is right that seems most wrong, 

If it be His sweet Will ! f. w. faber. 



16 BECKONINGS. 

20 January. Selfishness is the direct an- 
tagonist to the sense of the Infinite. The former 
cramps us within our own miserable body ; the 
latter spreads one abroad through the universe. 

F. W. Newman. 

All the doors that lead inward to the secret 
place of the Most High, are doors outward — out 
of self — out of smallness — out of wrong. 

Geoege MacDonald. 

21 January. Nothing is eternal but that 
which is done for God and others. That which is 
done for self dies. Perhaps it is not wrong, but 
it perishes. That which ends in self is mortal ; 
that alone which goes out of self into God lasts 

forever. F. W. Robertson. 

O brooding Spirit of Wisdom and of Love, 
Whose mighty wings even now o'ershadow 

me, 
Absorb me in Thine own immensity, 
And raise me far my finite self above ! 

Let no desire of ease, 
No lack of courage, faith, or love delay 
Mine own steps on that high, thought-paven 
way 
In which my soul her clear commission sees ! 
Yet with an equal joy let me behold 
Thy chariot o'er that way by others rolled ! 

W. R. Hamilton. 

22 January. God is infinite and without 
end ; but the soul's desire is an abyss which can- 
not be filled except by a Good which is infinite. 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 17 

God is a Good without drawback, and a well of 
living water without bottom ; and the soul is 
made in the image of God, and is therefore cre- 
ated to know and love God. John taulkr. 

From Thee is all that soothes the life of man, — 
His high endeavor, and his glad success, 
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve. 
But oh. Thou bounteous Giver of all good, 
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown ! 
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor, 
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away. 

COWPEK. 

23 January. In our outward occupations 
let us be more occupied with God than with all 
else. To do them well, we must do them in His 
presence and for His sake. At the sight of the 
majesty of God, calmness and serenity should 
possess the soul. A word from the Lord stilled 
the raging of the sea, and a glance from Him to 
us, and from us to Him, should still do the same 
in our daily life. f^elon. 

I sit within my room and joy to find 

That Thou, who always lovest, art with me here ; 
That I am never left by Thee behind. 

But by Thyself Thou keepest me ever near. 
The fire burns brighter when with Thee I look, 

And seems a kinder servant sent to me : 
With gladder eyes I read Thy holy book, 

Because Thou art the eyes by which I see. 

Jones Very. 



18 BECKONINGS. 

24 January. There is a darkness that comes 
of effulgence ; and the most veiling of all veils is 
the light. That for which the eye exists is light, 
but through light no human eye can pierce. I 
find myself beyond my depth. I am ever beyond 
my depth, afloat in an infinite sea ; but the depth 
of the sea knows me, for the ocean of my being 
is God. Gboegs MacDonald. 

Yea ! in Thy life our little lives are ended ; 

Into Thy depths our trembling spirits fall ; 
In Thee enfolded, gathered, comprehended, 

As holds the sea her waves — Thou boldest us 

all. Eliza Scuddbb. 

25 January. The mystery of light is the 
privilege and the prerogative of the profoundest 
things. The shallow things are capable only of 
the mystery of darkness. Nothing is so thin, so 
light, so small, that if you cover it with clouds 
and hide it in half-lights, it will not seem mysteri- 
ous. But the most genuine and profound things 
you may bring forth into the fullest light, and 
let the sunshine bathe them through and through, 
and in them will open ever new wonders of mys- 
teriousness. Philups bbcwks. 

What heart can comprehend Thy name. 

Or, searching, find Thee out. 
Who art within a quickening Flame, 

A Presence round about ? 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 19 

O sweeter than all else besides, 

The tender mystery 
That like a veil of shadow hides 

The Light I may not see ! 

F. L. HOSMEB. 

26 January. Sweep away the illusions of 
time ; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near 
moving cause to the far-distant Mover ! — Then 
sawest thou that this fair universe, were it in the 
meanest province thereof, is in very deed the 
star-domed City of God ; that through every star, 
through every grass-blade, and most through 
every living soul, the glory of a present God still 
beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture 
of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him 

from the foolish. Thomas Carlylb. 

Crystal the pavement 

Seen through the stream ; 
Firm the reality 

Under the dream : 
We may not feel it ; 

Still we may mend ; 
How we have conquered 

Not known till the end. 

Henry Alpord. 

27 January. Among the children of God, 
while there is always that fearful and bowed ap- 
prehension of His majesty, and that sacred dread 
of all offense to Him, which is called the fear of 
God, yet of real and essential fear there is not 
any, but clinging of confidence to Him as their 



20 BECKONINGS. 

Kock, Fortress, and Deliverer, and perfect love, 
and casting out of fear ; so that it is not possi- 
ble that while the mind is rightly bent on Him 
there should be any dread of anything either 
earthly or supernatural ; and the more dreadful 
seems the height of His majesty, the less fear 
they feel that dwell in the shadow of it. 

John Ruskin. 

28 January. From within or from behind, 
a light shines through us upon things, and makes 
us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. 

R. W. Emerson. 

Well, I have had my turn, have been 

Raised from the darkness of the clod, 
And for a glorious moment seen 

The brightness of the skirts of God ; 
And known the light within my breast, 

Though wavering oftentimes, and dim, — 
The power, the will, that never rest. 

And cannot die, — were all from Him. 

W. C. Bryant. 

29 January. Christ came to bring man's 
spirit into immediate contact with God's Spirit ; 
to sweep away everything intermediate. In lonely 
union,. face to face, man's spirit and God's Spirit 
must come together. It is a grand thought. 
Aspire to this 1 Aspire to greatness, goodness ! 
So let your spirit mingle with the Spirit of the 
Everlasting. F. W. Robertson. 

There is in heaven a light, whose goodly shine 
Makes the Creator visible to all 



THE INVISIBLE PRESENCE. 21 

Created, that in seeing Him alone 
Have peace : and in its circuit spreads so far 
That the circumference, with enlarging zone 
Doth girdle in the worlds. dante. 

30 January. Behold, He who hid Himself 
in darkness has come forth into the region which 
our most dear affections and our loftiest thoughts 
keep forever flooded with brightness. He is our 
Father, our Brother, our Inspiring Friend, — 
Father, Brother, Friend ! These are words of 

light. Phillips Brooks. 

Oh Light, so white and pure, 

Oft-clouded, and yet sure ! 

What matter by what Name 
We call Thee, — still art Thou the same, — 

God call we Thee, or Good. 
When now our day of life draws to its end, 
Looking, with less of awe and more of love, 

To Thy high throne above, 
We see no dazzling brightness as of old, 

No kingly splendors cold, 
But the sweet Presence of a heavenly Friend. 

Edwin Morris. 

31 January. 

We hear Thy voice when thunders roll 

Through the wide field of air ; 
The waves obey Thy dread control, — 

But still Thou art not there ! — 
Where shall I find Him, O my soul, 

Who yet is everywhere ? 



22 BECKONINGS. 

Oh, not in circling depth or height, 

But in the conscious breast, 
Present to faith, though veiled from sight, 

There does His Spirit rest. 
Oh come, Thou Presence Infinite, 

And make thy creature blest ! Condke. 

" Glory about thee, within thee ; and thou fulfill- 
est thy doom. 
Making Him broken gleams and a stifled splen- 
dor and gloom. 
Speak to Him, then, for He hears, and spirit 

with spirit can meet : 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
. hands and feet." 



SECOND MONTH. 



In February, the bare boughs of the elms 
have a pathetic look, stretching up towards the 
gray, unresponsive sky. Yet they seem to know 
it to be the same sky through which the summer 
sunshine melted into every fibre, winning forth 
delicate bud and luxuriant leafage, the same sky 
through which came to them the music of the 
west wind and the singing of birds. 

Now their innumerable little twigs reach out 
and upward, like beseeching fingers, numb with 
cold ; as if from the heart of the tree arose a si- 
lent prayer for warmth and light. But the sky 
gives no answer, except by the rough voice of the 
North Wind, that chills back the shivering germs 
into their cells. The great boughs groan, shaken 
by the gale, and all the branches shudder and 
sway in the bitter air. 

But they never withdraw their patient appeal, 
however tossed about and repulsed. For sum- 
mer is there, within the sky, and these fierce 
winds are her messengers, most friendly to the 
tree's growth, stirring its stagnant juices, and 
making it strong through resistance, for its won- 
derful future life. The heart of heaven is warm, 
behind her chilling breath, and the awaited bless- 
ing will surely come. 



24 BECKOXINGS. 

And the toil of the ti-ee goes on with her 
praver. Even in the midst of her struggle with 
the elements, the sap is steadily carried up from 
root to remotest branch, ready for earUest use. 
Natural creations as well as spiritual, work out 
their own salyation with fear and trembling, 
obeying the Inyisible Power that is at work 
within them. 



FEBRUARY. 
OUR WORK. 

1 February. The God of the Bible and the 
God of the Uniyerse. I now diyine afar off, may- 
be known as One. But I am sure that to know 
Him at all, except by guess. I must resolve to do 
my work within His world, rather than to specu- 
late about Him. Jobs Stfettvg. 

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty ; 

1 woke, and found that life was duty. 
TVas my dream, then, a shadowy lie ? 
Toil on. sad heart, courageously, 

And thou shalt find thy dream shall be 

A noonday light and truth to thee. 

Mes. Hooper. 

2 Febniary. To be at work, to do things 
for the world, to turn the currents of the things 

about us at our will, to make our existence a 
positiye element, eyen though it be no bigger 



OUR WORK. 25 

than a grain of sand, in this great system where 
we live, — that is a new joy of which the idle 
man knows no more than the mole knows of the 
sunshine, or the serpent of the eagle's triumphant 
flight into the upper ^air. The man who knows 
indeed what it is to act, to work, cries out, 

" This, this alone is to live ! " Phillips Brooks. 

Was it right, 
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled. 
That I should dream away the intrusted hours 
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart 
With feelings all too delicate for use ? 

S. T. Coleridge. 

3 February. Hold fast by the present! 
Every situation — nay, every moment — is of in- 
finite value, for it is the representative of a whole 

eternity. Goethe. 

Even the wisest are long in learning that there 
is no better work for them than the bit God puts 

into their hands. Edward Garrett. 

Better to stem with heart and hand 
The roaring tide of life, than lie 

Unmindful, on its flowery strand. 
Of God's occasions drifting by. 

J. G. Whittier. 

4 February. The situation that has not its 
duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. 
Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, des- 
picable Actual, wherein thou even now standest. 



k 



26 BECKONINGS. 

— here or nowhere is thy Ideal : work it out 
therefrom ; and working, believe, live, be free I 

T. Caeltlb. 

No man is born into the world, whose work 
Is not born with him. There is always work 
And tools to work withal, for those who will: 
And blessed are the horny hands of toil. 

James Russell Lowell. 

6 February. I cannot but think that one of 
the truest ways in which Christianity has made 
humility at once a commoner and a nobler grace, 
has been in the way it has furnished work for 
the higher powers of man, which used to be idle 
and only ponder proudly on themselves. 

Idleness standing in the midst of unattempted 
tasks is always proud. Work is always tending 
to humility. Work touches the keys of endless 
activity, opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck 
before the immensity of what there is to do. 

I am sure we all know the fine, calm, sober 
humbleness of men who have tried themselves 
against the tasks of life. It was great in Paul, 
and in Luther, and in Cromwell. It is some- 
thing that never comes into the character, never 
shows in the face of a man who has never 

worked. Phillips Beooks. 

6 February. 

Oh, labor truly blest! 
Thou rulest all the race : 
Over all the toiling earth I see thy gracious face 

Stand forth confest. 



OUR WORK. 27 

Where most thou art, 
Man rises upward to a loftier height 
And views the earth and heavens with clearer 
sight, 

And holds a cleaner heart. Edwin Moeris. 

There is no work so small, no art so mean, but 
it all comes from God, and is a special gift from 
Him. If, when at thy work, thou feel thy spirit 
stirred within thee, receive it with solemn joy, 
and thus learn to do thy work in God, instead of 
straightway fleeing from thy task. John tauler. 

7 February. It is no man's business whether 
he has genius or not : work he must, whatever he 
is, but quietly and steadily ; and the natural and 
unforced results of such work will always be the 
things that God meant him to do, and will be his 
best. If he be a great man, they will be great 
things ; if a small man, small things ; but always, 
if thus peacefully done, good and right. 

John Ruskin. 

But to the spirit elect there is no choice ; 
He cannot say. This will I do, or that : 
A hand is stretched to him from out the dark. 
Which grasping without question, he is led 
Where there is work that he must do for God. 

J. R. Lowell. 

8 February. Man, it is not thy works — 
which are mortal, infinitely little, and the great- 
est no greater than the least — but only the spirit 
thou workest in, that can have continuance. 

T. Carlyle. 



28 BECKONESTGS. 

Be sure, no earnest work 
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak, 
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much 
It is not gathered as a grain of sand 
To enlarge the sum of human action used 
For carrying out God's end. 
I count that heaven itself is only work 
To a surer issue. 

Let us be content, in work, 
To do the thing we can, and not presume 
To fret because it 's little. Mes. e. b. BKowmNo. 

9 February. Every man's business, what- 
ever it be, becomes a liberal education to him 
just as soon and just as far as he lives not in its 

methods but in its principles. Phillips Bkooks. 

The smallest things become great when God 
requires them of us: they are small only in 
themselves : they are always great when they are 
done for God, and when they serve to unite us 
with Him eternally. Fekelon. 

All may of Thee partake : 

Nothing can be so mean, 
Which, with this tincture — FOR Thy sake, 

Will not grow bright and clean. 

A servant, with this clause, 

Makes drudgery divine : 

Who sweeps a room as by Thy laws, 

Makes that and the action fine. 

George Hebbebt. 



OUR WORK. 29 

10 February. A Christian should never 
plead spirituality for being a sloven. If he be 
but a shoe-cleaner, he should be the best in the 

parish. John Newton. 

This world has work for us ; we must refuse 
No honest task, no uncongenial toil. 
Fear not your feet to tire, nor robe to soil ; 

Nor let your hands grow white for want of use ! 

T. Ashe. 

11 February. If two angels were sent from 
heaven to execute a divine command, one to 
conduct an empire, and another to sweep a street 
in it, they would feel no inclination to change 
employments. John Newton. 

You and I, toiling for earth, may toil also for 
heaven ; and every day's work may be a Jacob's 
ladder reaching up nearer to our God. 

Theodore Paeker. 

Like the star 

That shines afar, 

Without haste 

And without rest 
Let each man wheel with steady sway 
Round the task that rules the day, 

* And do his best ! Goethe. 

12 February. It is right that we should 
have an aim of our own, with something peculiar 
in it, determined by our individuality and our 
surroundings ; but this may readily degenerate 



30 BECKONINGS. 

into exclusive narrowness, unless it has for a 
background the great thought that there is a 
Kingdom of God within us, around us, and above 
us, in which we, with all our powers and aims, 
are called to be conscious workers. Towards 
the forwarding of this silent, ever - advancing 
kingdom, our little work, whatever it be, if good 
and true, may contribute something. And this 
thought lends to any calling, however lowly, a 
consecration which is wanting even to the loftiest 
self-chosen ideals. J. c. Shairp. 

I would not be 
A worker for mine own bread, or one hired 

For mine own profit. Oh, I would be free 
To work for others ; Love so earned of them 

Should be my wages and my diadem. 

Jean Ingblow. 

13 February. It seems as if the heroes had 
done almost all for the world that they can do, 
and not much more can come till common men 
awake and take their common tasks. I do be- 
lieve the common man's task is the hardest. 
The hero has the hero's aspiration that lifts him 
to his labor. All great duties are easier than 
the little ones, though they cost far more blood 
and agony. That is a truth we all find out. , 

Phillips Brooks. 

Art little ? Do thy little well, and for thy com- 
fort know 
Great men can do their greatest work no better 

than just so. Goethe. 



OUR WORK. 31 

14 February. 

The primal duties shine aloft, like stars ; 

The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless. 

Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers. 

The generous inclination, the just rule. 

Kind wishes and good actions and pure thoughts. 

No mystery is here, no special boon 

For high and not for low. Wordsworth. 

Work for some good, be it ever so slowly : 
Cherish some flower, be it ever so lowly : 
Labor ! all labor is noble and holy : 

Let thy great deeds be thy prayer to thy God ! 

Frances S. Osgood. 

16 February. Let the children of labor re- 
member that they are of the class which He of 
Nazareth dignified; that, peradventure, in His 
youthful days of mechanic toil, He too was looked 
down upon by the coarse eye of sheer power, — 
and yet He nurtured, amid indignities and neglect, 
the spirit that made Him divinely wise. 

James Martineau. 

And rugged toil no more shall bear 
The burden of old crime, or mark of primal 
shame : 

A blessing now, — a curse no more ; 

Since He whose name we breathe with awe, 

The coarse mechanic vesture wore, — 

A poor man toiling with the poor, 
In labor, as in prayer, fulfilling the same law. 

J. G. Whittier. 

16 February. Out of the common stones of 



32 BECKOXIXGS. 

your daily work you may build yourself a tem- 
ple which shall shelter your head from all harm, 
and bring down on you the inspii^ation of God. 

Theodobb PA£EEB. 

What though unmarked the happy workman toil, 
And break, unthanked of men, the stubborn 
clod: 

It is enough, for sacred is the soil, 

Dear are the hills of God. Jean In-gelow. 

17 February. The advent of better times 
for the working-classes depends on their own per- 
sonal reformation, chastity, sobriety, and self-con- 
trol. It will be said, '• Is this your message to 
the poor — this severe, heartless message ? " 

Yes, even so ; the laws of the universe are 
very stem, alter them you cannot. It would be 
far more easy, far more palatable to lay the 
blame on their oppressors rather than on them ; 
the only objection to such a course is the stern 
unalterable law of God's universe. The law of 
life is this : No one can be good, or great, or 
happy, except through inward efforts of his own, 
sustained by faith, and strengthened by the grace 
of God. The message of the Baptist must be 
repeated : '• Change yourselves, or to you at least 
no kingdom of God can come." f. w. Robertson. 

18 February. Is it not true that a man's 

heart can really be only in the heart of his work, 
and that the most conscientious faithfulness in 
details will always belong to the man, not who 



OUR WORK. 33 

serves the details, but who serves the idea of the 

work which he has to do ? Phillips Brooks. 

On bravely through the sunshine and the showers ! 
Time hath his work to do, and we have ours. 

R. W. Emerson. 

19 February. A great, growing, grandly 
unfolding soul can be fashioned anywhere, if only 
God is with him; and his faculty, it may be, 
will be completing itself as truly in one employ- 
ment as in another. His heart will grow as big, 
his imagination kindle itself in fires to him of as 
great beauty, he will be as original, as deep, as 
free, and will swing his nature into as high force 
every way, in using a hammer as in using a pen. 

God nowhere allows what we so constantly as- 
sume, that souls are kept back from their com- 
pleteness by their trades, and grades, and employ- 
ments. He is going to complete them all, if they 
will suffer it, in the highest and most perfect 
form of being possible. h. Bushnell. 

20 February. 

I would not ask Thee that my work 

Should never bring me pain or fear, 
Lest I should learn to work alone. 
And never wish Thy presence near. 

But I would ask a humble heart, 

A changeless will to work and wake, 

A firm faith in Thy providence : 

The rest — 't is Thine to give or take. 

Alfred Norris. 



34 BECKONINGS. 

21 February. This, then, is the great truth 
of Christ. The treasury of life, your life and 
mine, the life of every man and every woman, 
however different they are from one another, they 
are all in Him. In Him there is the perfeet- 
ness of every occupation : the perfect trading, the 
perfect housekeeping, the perfect handicraft, the 
perfect school-teaching, they are all in Him. In 
Him lay the completeness of that incomplete act 
which you did yesterday. In Him lay the possi- 
ble holiness of that which you made actual sin. 

To go to Him and get the perfect idea of life 
and of every action of life, and then to go forth 
and by His strength fulfill it, — that is the New 
Testament conception of a strong, successful life. 
How simple and how glorious it is ! 

Phillips Beooks. 

22 February. 

They find their glory in their task, 

Their gladness in their care : 
What grace, what glory, need they ask, 

Who of Thy household are ? 

No weariness overcomes their feet ; 

For Thee they go and come : 
Their painful pilgrimage how sweet ! 

Still, still they are at home. 

Lord, may I call this bliss my own, — 

This nearness sweet to Thee ? 
May I, poor weakling wanderer lone, 

Of Thine own household be ? 



OUR WORK. 35 

For Thee my hands would toil ; for Thee 

My feet would go and come : 
Still of Thy household I would be 

On earth, in heaven at home. 

T. H. Gill. 

23 February. Make use even of those times 
in the day when you are only partially occupied 
with external things to occupy yourself inwardly 
with God ; for instance, while doing needlework, 
maintain a close sense of the presence of God. 
The thought of His presence is less easily pre- 
served in conversation, but even then you can 
frequently recall a general consciousness of it, 
overruling your every word. Fenelon. 

Lo ! amid the press, 
The whirl and hum and pressure of my day, 
I hear Thy garment's sweep, Thy seamless dress, 
And close beside my work and weariness 

Discern Thy gracious form, not far away, 
But very near, O Lord, to help and bless. 

The busy fingers fly, the eyes may see 

Only the glancing needle which they hold. 

But all my life is blossoming inwardly. 

And every breath is like a litany ; 

While through each labor, like a thread of gold, 

Is woven the sweet consciousness of Thee ! 

Susan Coolidge. 

24 February. There is no service like his 

that serves because he loves. Sm Philip Sidney. 



36 BECKONINGS. 

And deign, O Watcher, with the sleepless brow, 

Pathetic in its yearning, — deign reply : 

Is there, oh, is there aught that such as Thou 

Wouldst take from such as I ? 

Are there no briers across Thy pathway thrust, 

Are there no thorns that compass it about, 
Nor any stones that Thou wilt deign to trust 

My hands to gather out ? Jean ingelow. 

25 February. In most of the relations of 
life we find it a tough lesson — yet we are far 
the more robust for learning it — to be content 
to do good for the doing of it only. One has 
achieved heroic self-conquest when one's habit of 
mind takes it as a thing of course that the best 
life is to be one of unthanked self-denial. That 
is a discovery which we all have to make, in the 
economics of beneficence, if we have any persist- 
ent plan of unselfish living. Austin Phelps. 

Honest love, honest sorrow, 

Honest work for the day, honest hope for the mor- 
row. 

Are these worth nothing more than the hand they 
make weary. 

The heart they have saddened, the life they 
leave dreary ? 

Hush ! the sevenfold heavens to the voice of the 
Spirit 

Echo, " He that o'ercometh shall aU things in- 
herit ! " OwKN Meredith. 



OUR WORK. 37 

26 February. 

Spirits are not finely touched, 
But to fine issues. Shakespeare. 

God did anoint thee with His odorous oil, 

To wrestle, not to reign. Mrs. Browning. 

God doth not need 
Either man's works or His own gifts ; who best 
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state 
Is kingly ; thousands at His bidding speed 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest : 
They also serve who only stand and wait. 

John Milton. 

27 February. Every great work is endless : 
we can never accomplish it perfectly. The Son 
of God, when called away, found the world far 
away from the kingdom of heaven He came to 
establish. For what He accomplished He glori- 
fied God : for what He could not accomplish, He 
looked up in trust to the Holy Spirit to accom- 
plish when He was gone. p. c. mozoomdar. 

We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws 
To which the triumph of all good is given, — 
High sacrifice, and labor without pause 
Even to the death ! else, wherefore should the eye 
Of man converse with immortality ? Wordsworth. 

28 February. 

Rest is not quitting 
The busy career ; 
Rest is the fitting 
Of self to its sphere. 



38 BECKONINGS. 

'T is the brook's motion, 

Clear without strife, 
Fleeing to ocean 

After its life. 

'T is loving and serving 

The highest and best : 
'T is onward, unswerving ! — 

And that is true rest. J. s. Dwight. 

29 February. For the reward is not repose, 
but fresh work, a larger sphere of usefulness 
and influence. The command over ten cities is 
given to the man whose pound had grown to ten 
pounds ; the command of five cities to the man 
whose pound had grown to five pounds. The 
faculty of doing good, by an eternal law, is mul- 
tiplied and magnified according to the use which 
is made of it. F. D. Maurice. 

Beloved, let us love so well 
Our work shall still be better for our love, 
And still our love be sweeter for our work ! 

Mrs. Browning. 



SPEING. 



Ko matter what the almanac may say, 

The year begins with the first m.onth of spring", 

When snowdrifts into rivulets slip away. 
And bluebirds of the coming violet sing ; 

When March winds sweep the stairway of the rocks 
From rubbish-heaps of autumn leafage clear, 

And the sun turns back from the equinox 
To welcome and lead home the baby year. 

The baby's name is Spring. Around her feet 
Quaint ferns their scrolls unroll, and mosses rare 

With coral fairy-cups steal down to meet 

Her winsome footsteps on the woodland stair. 



THIRD MONTH. 



There comes a season — we hardly know 
whether it is winter or spring — after Earth is 
unclothed of her white cerements, but while she 
is not yet clothed upon with her May radiance 
and freshness, when the air seems stu'red with 
mighty prophecies. VTe can almost imagine that 
the seed and the rootlet sleeping beneath the sod 
hear the voices that call to them from above. 
The March wind is the archangel's trumpet of 
the flowers, bidding them arise and Hve. 

Ah ! could we but hear and understand the 
grander prophet-cry that resounds over our sleep- 
ing powers, every one of which was meant to 
bless the earth by its bloom : could we oj^en our 
ears to the tenderness hidden in the stern blast 
that disturbs, though it does not always arouse 
us. we should be fitter inhabitants of God's earth 
and heaven. But we can slumber on, we can let 
our best impulses die within us, we can be per- 
versely deaf to the loudest call out of the heaven 
so close above us, we can make ourselves believe 
that this call is only a voice heard in a dream, 
and that the earth where we drowse is all ; and 
this, alas I we do too willingly. 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 41 

But the great, summoning angels sent from 
God make a vast unrest in the air of the world 
for us who know ourselves heirs of the life and 
immortality which Christ has brought to light. 
May the lofty music of that " Awake, O sleep- 
er ! '* sound on until we hear ! 



MARCH. 
OUR NEIGHBOR. 

1 March. That habit of the old painters of 
introducing portrait into all their highest works 
I look to, not as error in them, but as the very 
source and root of their superiority in all things ; 
for they were too great and too humble not to 
see in every face about them that which was 
above them, and which no fancies of theirs could 
match or take place of. John Rusxin. 

We live by admiration, hope, and love ; 
And even as these are well and wisely fixed. 
In dignity of being we ascend. Wordsworth. 

2 March. Every individual nature has its 
own beauty. There is no face, no form, which 
one cannot in fancy associate with great power 
of intellect or with generosity of soul. Every 
face, every figure, suggests its own right and 
sound estate. Our friends are not their own 
highest form. 

We see on the lip of our companion the pres- 



I 



42 BECKONINGS. 

ence or absence of the great masters of thought 
and poetry to his mind. We read on his brow, 
on meeting him after many years, that he is 
where we left him, or that he has made great 
strides. R. w. Emeeson. 

How little thou canst tell 
How much in thee is ill or well ! 
Nor for thy neighbor nor for thee, 
Be sure, was life designed to be 
A draught of dull complacency. 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 

3 March. If not by sympathy discovered, 
it is not in words explicable with what divine 
lines and lights the exercise of godliness and 
charity will mould and gild the hardest and cold- 
est countenance, neither to what darkness their 
departure will consign the loveliest. John Ruskin. 

In the yearning tenderness of a child 
For every bird that sings above his head, 
And every creature feeding on the hills. 
And every tree, and flower, and running brook, 
We see how everything was made to love, 
And how they err who, in a world like this, 
Find anything to hate but human pride. 

N. P. Willis. 

4 March. When we believe that God is the 
common Father, and that all men and all things 
which He has made are dear to Him when we 
think that He is near to every one of us, and 
that in Him we live and move and have our 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 48 

being, then we cannot count any man or any 
thing common or unclean. We believe that there 
is a divine element in each man and each object, 
and our constant effort must be to draw out this 
divine element. w. h. Feeemantle. 

You must, for wisdom, for sanity, have some 
access to the mind and heart of the common hu- 
manity. The exclusive excludes himself. 

R. W. Emeeson. 

6 March. Poor and shallow as one's own 
soul is, it is blessed to think that a sort of tran- 
substantiation is possible by which the greater 
ones can live in us. Egotism apart, another's 
greatness, beauty, or bliss is one's own. And let 
us sing a Magnificat when we are conscious that 
this power of expansion and sympathy is grow- 
ing just in proportion as the individual satisfac- 
tions are lessening. Miserable dust of the earth 
we are, but it is worth while to be so for the 
sake of the living soul, — the breath of God 
within us. Geoegb Eliot. 

6 March. What is meant by our neighbor 
we cannot doubt ; it is every one with whom we 
are brought into contact, he or she, whosoever it 
be, whom we have any means of helping. 

Dean Stanley. 

Man is God's image ; but a poor man is 

Christ's stamp to boot. Geoegb Heebeet. 

Give human nature reverence for the sake 
Of One who bore it, making it divine 



I 



44 BECKONINGS. 

With the ineffable tenderness of God ! 

Let common need, the brotherhood of prayer, 

The heirship of an unknown destiny, 

The unsolved mystery round about us, make 

A man more precious than the gold of Ophir ! 

J. G. Whittiee. 

7 March. Men will never be joined in true 
brotherhood by mere plans to give them a self- 
interest in common. To feel for each other they 
must first feel with each other. They must have, 
not one object of gain, but an object of admira- 
tion in common. To know that they are brothers, 
they must feel that they have one Father. 

Chaeles Kingsley. 

Since Enoch, other men have walked with God ; 

Not Abraham only has He called His friend ; 
But men who have our dusty highways trod, 

Whose hands we touch, with whose our voices 
blend. 

His friends will know His friends. How much 
we miss, 

Shutting Him out of our heart's holy place — 
Not recognizing every soul as His — 

Not seeing Him in every human face ! 

8 March. I am certain that it is impossible 
to keep the law towards one's neighbor except 
one loves him. The law itself is infinite, reach- 
ing to such delicacies of action that the man who 
tries most will be the man most aware of defeat. 
We are not made for law, but for love. Love is 
law, because it is infinitely more than law. 

George MacDonald. 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 45 

Poor indeed thou must be, if around thee 
Thou no ray of light and joy canst throw ; 

If no silken cord of love hath bound thee 
To some little world, through weal and woe. 

Daily struggling, though unloved and lonely, 
Every day a rich reward will give : 

Thou wilt find, by hearty striving only. 
And truly loving, thou canst truly live. 

Harriet W. Sewall. 

9 March. There is no beautifier of complex- 
ion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter 
joy and not pain around us. It is good to give 
a stranger a meal or a night's lodging. It is 
better to be hospitable to his good meaning and 
thought, and give courage to a companion. 

R. W. Emerson. 
The meal unshared is food unblest : 

Thou hoard'st in vain what love should spend. 
Self-ease is pain ; thy only rest 

Is labor for a worthy end. J. G. Whittier. 

10 March. If there be a pleasure on earth 
which angels cannot enjoy, and which they might 
almost envy man the possession of, it is the 
power of relieving distress. 

If there be a pain which devils might pity 
man for enduring, it is the death-bed reflection 
that we have possessed the power of doing good, 
but that we have abused and perverted it to pur- 
poses of evil. Lacon. 

Man is dear to man ; the poorest poor 
Long for some moments in a weary life 



46 BECKONINGS. 

When they can know and feel that they have 

been 
Themselves the fathers and the dealers-out 
Of some small blessings ; have been kind to such 
As needed kindness, — for this single cause, 
That we have all of us one human heart. 

WOEDSWOETH. 

11 March. To understand any man, we must 
have sympathy for him, even affection. No in- 
tellectual acuteness, no amount even of pity for 
his errors, will enable us to see the man from 
within, and put our own souls into the place of 
his soul. To do that, one must have passed 
more or less through his temptations, doubts, 
hunger of heart and brain. Chaeles Kingslby. 

I ask Thee for a thoughtful love, 
Through constant watching wise, 

To meet the glad with joyful smiles, 
And wipe the weeping eyes ; 

And a heart at leisure from itself. 

To soothe and sympathize. a. l. waeinq. 

12 March. The tale of the Divine Pity was 
never yet believed from lips that were not felt to 
be moved by human pity. Geoege Euot. 

" Ask God to give thee skill 

In comfort's art, 
That thou mayest consecrated be, 

And set apart 
Unto a life of sympathy ! 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 47 

For heavy is the weight of ill 

In every heart ; 
And comforters are needed much, 

Of Christ-Hke touch." 

13 March. The more we believe in a Christ 
who is the divine type, the root, the holder to- 
gether of all the creation and of all human na- 
ture, the more certain we feel that, in holding 
to truth and love where they are found, men are 
holding to Christ Himself. By unbelievers this 
might be doubted ; but by believers in Christ it 
must be held true. And this enables us to em- 
brace (whether they respond to the embrace or 
not) all who have a sympathy with goodness, 
even in its simplest elements. w. h. Feeemantle. 

But heaven and earth have been 
More near, since earth hath seen 

Its God walk earth as Man, since heaven hath 
shown 
A Man upon its throne : 
The street and market-place 
Grow holy ground ; each face — 
Pale faces, marked with care. 
Dark, toil-worn brows — grows fair. 

King's children are these all : though want and 
sin 

Have marred their beauty glorious within, 

We may not pass them but with reverent eye. 

Dora Greenwell. 

14 March. How can the Son of Man be 



48 BECKONINGS. 

acknowledged, how can the King of men be 
seen in Him who humbled Himself to the lowest 
estate, if the rich man does not feel himself on a 
level with the poorest, if his humanity is not that 
which is most precious to him ? 

To be saved from this self-exaltation, this in- 
humanity, is indeed impossible by any efforts of 
men, by any precepts of men, by any conven- 
tions of society. But God, who has appointed 
riches for men, who has intended that one man 
should have what another is without, who has 
organized society on the law of mutual depend- 
ency and charity, does not leave rich men, any 
more than poor men, to be the victims of their 
circumstances. He awakens a hunger and thirst 
in them which nothing but His righteousness will 
appease. By a thousand methods of gracious 
discipline He makes them feel that the sorrows 
which cause the beggar's heart to ache are those 
which cause the rich man's heart to ache ; that 
the sky and the air which they and the poorest 
share together are more than what they possess 
and the other wants ; that God is the peasant's 
God as well as theirs. F. D. maueice. 

15 March. How greatly the value of a gift 
depends upon the manner of giving ! " He who 
gives soon," according to the old proverb, " gives 
twice." So he who gives with simplicity, that is, 
with singleness of purpose, without an underhand 
design, without expecting praise or notice, he 
gives twice, thrice, a hundredfold, more than he 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 49 

who gives grudgingly, than he who gives late, 
than he who gives ostentatiously. One gift well 
given is as good as a thousand ; a thousand gifts 
ill given are hardly better than none. 

Dean Stanley. 

Sweet is the tear that from some Howard's eye 
Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth : 
And he that works me good with unmoved face 
Does it but half ; he chills me while he aids ; 
My benefactor, not my brother man ! 

S. T. COLEEIDGE. 

16 March. Only the man who gives, hop- 
ing for nothing again, who gives freely, without 
calculation, out of the fullness of his heart, ever 
can find his love returned to him. He may win 
hatred as well as love ; but love does come in 
measures he could never dream of. We see it 
every day ; and every day, perhaps, we may be 
disappointed at finding some favors which we 
thought were well laid out bringing back no rec- 
ompense. They were bestowed with the hope 
of something again. F. D. maueicb. 

Give, as the morning that flows out of heaven ! 
Give, as the waves when their channel is riven ! 
Give, as the free air and sunshine are given ! 

Lavishly, utterly, carelessly, give ! 

Give, as He gave thee, who gave thee to live ! 

Rose Terry Cooke. 

17 March. How easy it is to show mercy in 
such a way that it will be no mercy, and how 
truly has the apostle laid his hand on the exact 



50 BECKOXINGS. 

quality which causes kindness to be really kind 
and mercy really merciful ! Not tenderness, not 
generosity, no ; but something we can all com- 
mand, cheerfulness, A bright smile, a beaming 
countenance, a playful word, these find an en- 
trance into the closed heart, and raise the down- 
cast eye, and bless him that gives and him that 

takes. DEA^- STA^-LEY. 

" We might all of us give far more than we do, 

without being a bit the worse : 
It was never yet loving that emptied the heart, 

nor giving that emptied the purse. 
We must be like the woman our Saviour praised, 

and do but the best we can." 
" Ay, that '11 be just the plan, neighbor, that '11 

be just the plan." Doba GEEE^-wELL. 

18 March. But why need instances be mul- 
tiplied to confirm what all experience proves, 
that every generous and exalted life blesses — 
who shall say how greatly ? — not only through 
direct effort, but simply by being what it is ? 
Just as a selfish and contracted nature makes aU 
shrink and narrow up with which it comes in con- 
tact, so does a free and bountiful spirit expand 
and quicken all it meets with ; it touches more 
points than it is itself aware of, and is forever 
widening its circle of benediction, and drawing 
within it some fresh and warm interest. Who 
shaU tell where the warmth and radiance a gen- 
erous heart casts round it stops ? We may as 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 51 

well try to measure a sunbeam, or to mark the 

place it falls on. The best blessing lies, 

" Not in that which we give, but that which we 

share ; 

For the gift without the giver is bare." 

Dora Greenwell. 

19 March. 

Small service is true service while it lasts. 
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, 

Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun. 

Wordsworth. 

The least flower, with a brimming cup, may 

stand 
And share its dewdrop with another near. 

Mrs. BROWNma. 

20 March. A man is a poor limitary bene- 
factor. He ought to be a shower of benefits, — a 
great influence, which should never let his brother 
go, but should refresh old merits continually with 
new ones : so that, though absent, he should 
never be out of my mind, his name never far 
from my lips ; but if the earth should open at 
my side, or my last hour were come, his name 
should be the prayer I should utter to the uni- 
verse. R. W. Emerson. 

Be useful where thou livest, that they may 
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still, — 

Find out men's wants and will. 
And meet them there. All worldly joys go less 
To the one joy of doing kindnesses. 

George Herbert. 



52 BECKONINGS. 

21 March. Where thought and love are act- 
ive — thought the formative power, love the vital- 
izing — there can be no sadness. They are in 
themselves a more intense and extended partici- 
pation of a divine existence. As they grow, the 
highest species of faith grows too, and all things 
are possible. George Eliot. 

Faith shares the future's promise ; Love's 

Self-off ering is a triumph won ; 
And each good thought or action moves 

The dark world nearer to the sun. 

J. G. Whittier. 

22 March. As the sun does not wait for 
prayers and incantations that he may rise, but 
shines at once, and is greeted by all ; so neither 
wait thou for applause, and shouts, and eulogies, 
that thou mayest do well, but be a spontaneous 
benefactor, and thou shalt be beloved like the 

sun. Epictetxjs. 

It is not what the best men do, but what they 
are, that constitutes their truest benefaction to 
their fellow-men. Certainly, in our own little 
sphere, it is not the most active people to whom 
we owe the most. Among the common people 
whom we know, it is not necessarily those who 
are busiest, not those who, meteor-like, are ever 
on the rush after some visible change and work. 
It is the lives like the stars, which simply pour 
down on us the calm light of their bright and 
faithful being, up to which we look, and out of 
which we gather the deepest calm and courage. 

Phillips Brooks. 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 53 

23 March. The principle is, that God is the 
ungrudging bestower of blessings, and that men 
are His stewards to distribute these blessings. 
So far as they enter into His mind, the delight 
will be in spreading abroad, not in accumulat- 
ing. Their reward will be a continually growing 
knowledge of His character and purposes. Their 
treasure will be in whatever things are good, 
pure, true; their heart will be occupied with 
these. ^' !>• maueice. 

Then draw we nearer, day by day. 
Each to his brethren, all to God : 

Let the world take us as she may. 

We must not change our road. Keblb. 

24 March. The region of man's life is a 
spiritual region. God, his friends, his neighbors, 
his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone 
his spirit can find room. Himself is his dun- 
geon. His life is not in knowing that he lives, 
but in loving all forms of life. Geokge macDonald. 

I have unlearned contempt. 

Oh, if there is one law above the rest 

Written in reason, — if there is a word 

That I would trace as with a pen of fire 

Upon the unsunned temper of a child, — 

If there is anything that keeps the mind 

Open to angel-visits, and repels 

The ministry of ill, 't is human love ! 

God has made nothing worthy of contempt. 

N. p. Willis. 



54 BECKONINGS. 



I 



25 March. The right Christian mind will - 
find its own image wherever it exists ; it will 
seek for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens 
and caves, and it will believe in its being, often 
when it cannot see it. and always turn away its 
eyes fi'om beholding vanity : and so it will lie 
lovingly over all the faults and rough places offlj 
the human heart, as the snow from heaven does 
over the hard and black and broken mountain- 
rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catch- 
ing light for them to make them fair ; and that 
must be a steep and unkindly crag indeed which 

it cannot cover. Joh>- Ruskik. 

Be noble ! and the nobleness which lies 
In other men. sleeping, but never dead, 
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own. 

J, R. Lowmx. 

26 March. It is not. if we understand it 
rightly, a sign of decreasing, but of increasing, 
spirituality that miracles have ceased. And so 
it is a truer discrimination that recognizes the 
presence of God in men. the saints that are in 
the world, not by the miracles they work, but by 
the miracles they are, — by the way in which 
they bring the grace of God to bear on the sim- 
ple duties of the household and the street. 

The sainthoods of the lireside and of the mar- 
ket-place, — they wear no glory round their heads ; 
they do their duties in the strength of God ; they 
have theu' mart^-rdoms and win their palms ; and 
though they get into no calendars, they leave 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 55 

benediction and a force behind them on the earth 

when they go up to heaven. Phillips brooks. 

May I reach 

That purest heaven, — be to other souls 

The cup of strength in some great agony, — 

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 

And in diffusion ever more intense ! 

So shall I join the choir invisible 

Whose music is the gladness of the world. 

George Eliot. 

27 March. No man or woman of the hum- 
blest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure, and 
good without the world being better for it, with- 
out somebody being helped and comforted by the 

very existence of that goodness. Phillips Brooks. 

No stream from its source 
Flows seaward, how lonely soever its course, 
But some land is gladdened. No star ever rose 
Or set without influence somewhere. Who 
knows 
What earth needs from earth's lowliest creature ? 

No life 
Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife. 
And aU life not be purer and stronger thereby. 

Owen Meredith. 

28 March. We must advance, as we live 
on, from what is brilliant to what is pure, and 
from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and 
from what is our strength to what is our crown ; 
only observing in all things how that which is 



56 BECKONINGS. 

indeed wrong, and to be cut up from the root, is 
dislike, and not affection. For by the very na- 
ture of these beautiful qualities which I have de- 
fined to be the signature of God upon His works 
it is evident that in whatever we altogether dislike 
we see not all ; that the keenness of our vision is 
to be tested by the expansiveness of our love. 

John Ruskin. 

29 March. A man must not choose his 
neighbor ; he must take the neighbor that God 
sends him. In him, whoever he be, lies, hid- 
den or revealed, a beautiful brother. Any rough- 
hewn semblance of humanity will at length be 
enough to move the man to reverence and af- 
fection. 

It is harder for some to learn this than for 
others. There are . those whose first impulse is 
ever to repel, and not to receive. But even these 
may grow in this grace until a countenance un- 
known will awaken in them a yearning of affec- 
tion rising to pain, because there is for it no 
expression, and they can only give the man to 
God and be still. Gboege macDonald. 

And judge none lost ! but wait and see, 
With hopeful pity, not disdain. 

The depth of the abyss may be 
The measure of the height of pain 

And love and glory that may raise 

This soul to God in after-days. 

Adelaide A. Peocteb. 

30 March. It is not for ourselves alone that 



OUR NEIGHBOR. 57 

we live and aspire, but by our sympathy we carry 
others with us. For this, perhaps, is the highest 
form of influence : not one man doing good to 
another, but one holding the hand of his brother, 
as saying, " Let us aspire together, God helping 
us, towards that which is just and pure and true." 

W. H. Freemantlb. 

To thine own self be true. 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. 

Shaeespeabb. 

He that feeds men serveth few ; 
He serves all who dares be true. 

R. W. Emerson. 

31 March. And then comes that last and 
most difficult lesson of Love, to make allowance 
even for the uncharitable. For, surely, below all 
that uncharitableness which is so common there 
is often a germ of the life of Love ; and be- 
neath that intolerance which may often wound 
ourselves a loving and a candid eye may discern 
zeal for God. Earth has not a spectacle more 
glorious or more fair to show than this : Love 
tolerating intolerance, — Charity covering as with 
a veil even the sin of the lack of charity. 

F. W. Robertson. 
Yet in the eye of life's all-seeing sun 
We shall behold a something we have done ; 
Shall, of the work together we have wrought, 
Beyond our aspiration and our thought 
Some not unworthy issue yet receive, — 
For love is fellow-service, I believe. 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 



FOURTH MONTH. 



April is the promise-month. Sunshine and 
breeze and bird invite the hidden life of earth up 
into the freedom and glory of the air. The buds 
of arbutus and violet and anemone tremble tim- 
idly at the doors of their underground prison, 
and the grass hardly dares to spread its delicate 
carpet over the fields. 

But heaven vrill meet the shrinking earth more 
closely, more persuasively yet. The raiu descends 
from the skies, warm, tender, and fresh. It goes 
down to the roots of the grateful plant, and, like 
human sympathy, wins its way into darkness 
nothing else could penetrate. Now all fragile 
growing things venture forth, sparkling with Hght 
and dew, and are enfolded with rainbows every- 
where. 

" Come forth and be glad ! " a thousand voices 
are calling. '' Fear not the strong sunshine and 
the keen wind I Come forth into the searching 
light and the invigorating air, and find your life, 
the perfect bloom that awaits you I " 

And the blessing of this resurrection-time pen- 
etrates also human souls with the inmost tender- 
ness of heaven. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 59 

Up, fearlessly, into the sunshine of truth, ye 
thoughts ! for more and more of light awaits, and 
more and heavenlier life is hid within you than ye 
have ever dreamed. Up, soul! open your eyes 
through grateful tears into the wide horizon of 
faith, and grow, through Him who is the Resur- 
rection and the Life, into and beyond your noblest 
visions of immortality ! 



APRIL. 
NATURE AND OURSELVES. 

1 April. Happy he whose eye may, from 
dawn to twilight, wander at will to distant hori- 
zons ! Happy he who sees the meadows grow 
green in April, who gathers the violet in the 
valley, who with his own hand both plants and 
reaps ! Happy he who breathes the fresh air of 
the country! Happy he who works at some 
healthy out-door work ; whose faculties, constant- 
ly reinvigorated, apply themselves fully, yet not 
feverishly, to the task God has assigned them ! 

Madame de Gasparin. 

Whether men sow or reap the fields. 
Divine monition Nature yields. 
That not by bread alone we live, 
Or what a hand of flesh can give ; 
That every day should leave some part 
Free for a sabbath of the heart : 
So shall the seventh be truly blest. 
From morn to eve, with hallowed rest. 

Wordsworth. 



I 



60 BECKONmGS. 

2 April. It is the beautiful characteristic of 
industry that, instead of takmg us away from 
God and things eternal, it takes us directly to- 
wards Him, and puts us waiting on the seasons, 
the soil, the mechanical powers, which are but 
the faithful bosom of God Himself; and there 
we hang.; year by year, watching for our sup- 
plies and the nutriment that feeds our bodies. 
Our very industry is a kind of physical prayer, 
and the business itself of our busy life is to watch 
the gates of blessing He opens to us. 

HOKACE BUSHNELL. 

One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee ! 

One lesson which on every wind is blown ; 
One lesson of two duties kept at one. 

Though the loud world proclaim their en- 
mity ; — 
Of toil unsevered from tranquillity ; 

Of labor that in lasting fruit outgrows 
Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose 

Too great for haste, too high for rivalry. 

Matthew Arnold. 

3 April. As we travel the way of life, we 
have the choice, according to our working, of 
turning all the voices of Nature into one song of 
rejoicing, and all her lifeless creatures into a 
glad company, whereof the meanest shall be beau- 
tiful in our eyes by its kind message ; or of with- 
ering and quenching her sympathy into a fearful 
withdrawn silence of condemnation, or into a cry- 
ing out of her stones and a shaking off her dust 

against us. John Ruskin. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 61 

Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live ; 
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud ! 

From the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 

Enveloping the earth, — 
And from the soul itself must there be sent 

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth. 
Of all sweet sounds the life and element ! 

S. T. COLEEIDGE. 

4 April. There is in Nature just as much, 
or as little, as the soul of each can see in her. 
And in order to see, the soul must have been 
trained for it both by habitual converse with the 
outward world, and also by converse with other 
regions of being, with other teachers. For other 
teachers are not less necessary than the beauty 
which lies in the face of Nature. J. c. Shaiep. 

The soul discerns 
A ray of heavenly light, gilding all forms : — 
The unambiguous footsteps of the God 
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing, 
And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds. 

COWPER. 

6 April. The knowledge of nature is a good 
thing, but it must be studied primarily in its nat- 
ural and healthy connection with ourselves. With 
every green tree that surrounds us with its rich 
leafage, with every shrub on the roadside where 
we walk, with every grass-blade that bends to the 



62 BECKONINGS. 

breeze in the field through which we pass, we have 
a natural relationship ; they are our true compa- 
triots. The birds that hop from twig to twig in 
our gardens, that sing in our bowers, are part 
of ourselves ; they speak to us from our earliest 
years, and we learn to understand their lan- 
guage. Goethe. 

More servants wait on man 
Than he '11 take notice of. In every path 

He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
O mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him. 

George Herbert. 

6 April. All about us, in earth and air, 
wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power 
ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a 
daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset, — a 
power that holds constant and sweetest relation 
with the dark and silent world within us. The 
same God who is in us, and upon whose tree 
we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is 
all about us : inside, the Spirit ; outside, the 
Word. George MacDonald. 

The Lord is in His Holy Place, 
In all things near and far ! 

Shekinah of the snowflake He, 
And glory of the star. 

And secret of the April land 
That stirs the field to flowers, 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 63 

Whose little tabernacles rise 

To hold Him through the hours. 

W. C. Gannett. 

7 April. There is nothing strange in our 
having afi&nity with the brutes and the herbs, 
with the rocks and the waves, if we acknowledge 
one Spirit which works through the whole crea- 
tion till it culminates in human morality and the 
cross of Jesus Christ. The perception of this is 
one of the highest effects of inspiration. It is 
nothing less than the divine thought inwrought 
in our minds, the divine order established in our 
renewed nature, the surest witness that we are 
made in the image of God, the spiritual mind by 
which we see each part of the universe in its re- 
lation to its centre, and evolving itself under the 
divine purpose towards complete organization and 
perfect harmony. w. h. Fbbemantle. 

We are part of an Infinite Scheme, 

All we that are ; 
Man the high crest and crown of things that be ; 
The fiery-hearted earth, the cold unfathomed sea. 

The central sun, the intermittent star : 

Things great and small, 
We are but parts of the Eternal All. 

Edwin Morris. 

8 April. Who that hath watched their ways 
with an understanding heart, could, as the vision 
evolving still advanced towards him, contem- 
plate the filial and loyal bee ; the home-building, 



64 BECKOXINGS. 

wedded, and divorceless swallow ; and above all 
the manifoldly intelligent ant-tribes, with their 
commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors 
and miners, the husbandfolk that fold in their 
tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin 
sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, 
detached and in selfless purity — and not say to 
himself, Behold the shadow of approacliing hu- 
manit}^, the sun rising, from behind, in the kin- 
dling morn of creation ! 

Thus all lower natures find their highest good 
in semblances and seekings of what is higher and 
better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend 
in their striving. And shall man alone stoop ? 

Well saith the moral poet — 
" Unless above himself he can 

Erect himself, how mean a thing is man ! " 

S. T. Coleridge. 

9 April. Insensate things, such as rocks and 
seas of water, do not grow. Animals and trees 
grow a little, for a little time, and come to their 
limit. But the grandest attribute of our created 
minds, one that belongs to no other finite crea- 
ture whatever, is that they have the gift of a 
growth everlasting. Hoe-^ce Busidnell. 

There can be no revelation to stones and trees 
and stars, nor of the spiritual to the physical. 
God is a person, and the revelation of God is of 
a person to and with a person. It thus presumes 
a ground of communion. eusha Mulpord. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 65 

10 April. The fact of our deriving constant 
pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of 
the Divine attributes, and from nothing but that 
which is so, is the most glorious of all that can 
be demonstrated of human nature ; it not only- 
sets a great gulf of separation between us and 
the lowe-r animals, but it seems a promise of a 
communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious 
with the Being whose darkened manifestations we 

here feebly and unthinkingly delight in. 

John Ruskin. 

Rejoice ! we are allied 

To That which doth provide 
And not partake — effect and not receive ! 

A spark disturbs our clod ; 

Nearer we hold of God 
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must 

believe. Robert Browning. 

11 April. The truly scientific man reverences 
all facts. Is not this one worth his considera- 
tion? 

The verdict of all ages has pronounced that 
the exclusively scientific man, he in whom the 
scientific side is everything, and the spiritual 
side — that is, heart, conscience, spiritual aspira- 
tion — goes for nothing, is but half a man, de- 
veloped only on one side of his nature, and that 
not the highest side. If God is to be appre- 
hended at all in a vital way, and not merely as 
an intellectual abstraction, it must be first from 
the spiritual side of our being — by the con- 



66 BECKOXIXGS. 

science, the spirit, the reverence, that Is in man 
— that He is mainly to be approached. This is 
the centre of the whole matter. j. c. Sh^jep. 

12 April. The more we see into nature and 
try to represent it, the more ignorant and help- 
less we find ourselves ; until sometimes I wonder 
whether God might not have made the world so 
rich and full just to teach His children humility. 

GSOBGB MacDOHJlLDl 

I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and 

no less, 
In the kind I imagined, full-fi^onts me. and God 

is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul 

and the clod. 
And thus looking within and around me, I ever 

renew 
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending 

upraises it too) 
The submission of man's nothing-perfect to Grod's 

all-complete, 
As by each new obeisance of spirit I climb to His 

feet. EoEEBT Baawmnsa. 

13 April. To those who live by faith, every- 
thing they see speaks of that future world ; the 
very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, 
and the richness and the beauty of the earth, 
are types and figures, witnessing and teaching 
the invisible things of God. All that we see is 
destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 67 

bloom, and to be transfigured into immortal 

glory. J* H* Newman. 

My Father, each delightful hour 

Unveils Thy smiling face : 
I gather every glorious flower, 

And thank my God of grace. 
At home I breathe the quiet air, 

I cast my soul abroad ; 
I do the work, I lift the prayer. 

Still, still my gracious God ! 
Each step, each look, each thought of mine 

My gracious God lets in : 
All, all my joys are gifts divine ; 

All, all is grace I win ! t. h. Gill. 

14 April. Do not study matter for its own 
sake, but as the countenance of God ! Try to 
extract every line of beauty, every association, 
every moral reflection, every inexpressible feel- 
ing, from it ! Charles Kingsley. 

We comprehend the earth only when we have 
known heaven. Without the spiritual world the 
material world is a disheartening enigma. 

JOUBERT. 

Come to me, come to me, O my God ! 

Come to me everywhere ! 
Let the trees mean Thee, and the grassy sod. 

And the water and the air ! 

George MacDonald. 

16 April. For the light of Revelation is not 



68 BECKONINGS. 

contrary to the light of Nature, but the comple- 
tion of it. It is no more contrary than flame is 
contrary to heat. Heat within takes ^e and 
blazes when external flame is applied. So the 
Life of God within is kindled by the Life of 
God manifested without in Christ. 

" As many as received Him, to them gave He 
power to become the sons of God." Observe, 
they were the sons of God before, unconsciously. 
But when they received Christ they got fresh 
power, they knew themselves God's children, 
and got strength to live as what they were by 
right. F. W. Robertson. 

O Bearer of the Key 
That shuts and opens with a sound so sweet 

Its turning in the wards is melody. 
All things we move among are incomplete 

And vain until we fashion them in Thee ! 

DoEA Geeenwell. 

16 April. It is Nature's highest reward to a 
true, simple, great soul that he gets thus to be a 

part of herself. Thomas Caklyle. 

Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from 
the natural unity ; — for thou wast made by na- 
ture a part, but now hast cut thyself off : — yet 
here is the beautiful provision that it is in thy 
power again to unite thyself. God has allowed 
this to no other part, — after it has been sepa- 
rated and cut asunder, to come together again. 

But consider the goodness with which He has 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 69 

privileged man ; for He has put it into his power, 
when he has been separated, to return and to be 
reunited and to resume his place. 

Marcus Aurelius. 

17 April. A character is a completely fash- 
ioned will. NOVALIS. 

Our joy and grief consist alike in this : 
In knowing what to will and what to do. 
But only he whose judgment never strays 
Beyond the threshold of the right, learns this. 
Nor is it always good to have one's wish : 
What seemeth sweet full oft to bitter turns ; 
Fulfilled desire hath made mine eyes to weep. 
Therefore, O reader of these lines, if thou 
Wouldst virtuous be, and held by others dear, 
Will ever for the power to do aright ! 

Leonardo da Vinci. 

18 April. Do you in good earnest aim at 
dignity of character ? By all the treasures of a 
peaceful mind, by all the charms of an open 
countenance, I conjure you, youth, turn away 
from those who live in the twilight between vice 
and virtue. Can anything manly proceed from 
those who for law and light would substitute 
shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses, which, as 
far as they differ from the vital workings in the 
brute animals, owe the difference to their former 
connection with the proper virtues of humanity ? 

Remember that love itself, in its highest earthly 
bearing, as the ground of the marriage union, 
becomes love by an inward fiat of the will, by a 



70 BECKONINGS. 

completing and sealing act of moral election, and 
lays claim to permanence only under the form of 

duty. S. T. COLKEIDGS. 

19 April. 

Stern daughter of the voice of God I 
O Duty ! — Thou dost wear 

The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we anything so fair 

As is the smile upon thy face ! 
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds ; 
And fragrance in thy footing treads. 

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 

And the most ancient heavens through thee are 
fresh and strong. Woedswosth. 

20 April. The aim which God assigns to us 
as our highest is indeed the direct reverse of that 
which we propose to ourselves. He would have 
us in perpetual conflict ; we crave an unbroken 
peace. He keeps us ever on the march ; we 
pace the green sod by the way with many a sigh 
for rest. He throws us on a rugged universe ; 
our first care is to make it smooth. 

Every way He urges our reluctant will. He 
grows the thistle and the sedge, but expects us 
to raise the olive and the corn, having given us 
strength and skill for such an end. 

And after all, in spite of the inertia of their 
will, men are, in their inmost hearts, on the side 
of God, rather than their own, in this matter. 

James Mabtinbau. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 



71 



So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low. Thou must, 

The youth replies, I can. R. w. Emerson. 

21 April. Thou art not the more holy for 
being praised, nor the more worthless for being 
dispraised. What thou art, that thou art ; neither 
by words canst thou be made greater than what 
thou art in the sight of God. 

If thou consider what thou art in thyself, thou 
wilt not care what men say of thee. 

Thomas a Kempis. 

We all need resistance to our errors on every 
side. " Woe unto us when all men speak well of 
us ! " And woe unto us when all men shall give 
way to us ! Henry more. 

22 April. He that has energy enough in his 
constitution to root out a vice, ought to go a little 
further, and plant a virtue in its place ; other- 
wise he will have his labor to renew. A strong 
soil that has produced weeds may be made to 
produce wheat with far less difficulty than it 
would cost to make it produce nothing. Lacon. 

Fear to do base, unworthy things is valor ; 

If they be done to us, to suffer them 

Is valor, too. BenJonson. 



23 April. Our whole life is startlingly moral. 
There is never an instant's truce between virtue 



72 BECKONINGS. 

and vice. Goodness is the only investment that 
never fails. h. d. thorbau. 

Things are saturated with the moral law. 
There is no escape from it. Violets and grass 
preach it ; rain and snow, wind and tides, every 
change, every cause in nature, is nothing but a 
disguised missionary. r. w. embrson. 

24 April. Nothing can work me damage ex- 
cept myself ; the harm that I sustain I carry 
about with me, and never am a real sufferer but 

by my own fault. St. Bernard. 

Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt ; 

Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled. 

But evil on itself shall back recoil. 

And mix no more with goodness. If this fail, 

The pillared firmament is rottenness, 

And earth's base built on stubble. Milton. 

25 April. 

The victory is most sure 
For him who, seeking faith by virtue, strives 
To yield entire submission to the law 
Of conscience, — conscience reverenced and 

obeyed 
As God's most intimate presence in the soul. 
And His most perfect image in the world. 

Wordsworth. 

Not to believe in good and in its final and 
complete victory is simply not to believe in God 
Himself. Dora Greenwell. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 73 

For right is right, since God is God, 
And right the day must win : 

To doubt would be disloyalty ; 

To falter would be sin. f. w. faber. 

26 April. Manhood begins when we have 
in any way made truce with necessity ; — but 
begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have 
reconciled ourselves to necessity, and thus in re- 
ality triumphed over it, and felt that in necessity 

we are free. Thomas Caelylb. 

Then welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough. 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go ! 

Robert Browning. 

27 April. Can man or woman choose duties? 
No more than they can choose their birthplace or 
their father and mother. George eliot. 

Thou camest not to thy place by accident ; 
It is the very place God meant for thee. 
Let not the time thou owest to God be spent 
In idly dreaming how thou mightest be, 
In what concerns thy spiritual life, more free 
From inward hindrance or impediment ! 

E. C. Trench. 

28 April. Those that can look with dry 
and undispleased eyes upon another's sin never 
truly mourned for their own. It is a godless 
heart that doth not find itself concerned in God's 
quarrel. Bishop Hall. 



74 BECKOKINGS. 

The joy that comes in sorrow's guise, 
The sweet pains of self-sacrifice, 
I would not have them otherwise. 
And what were life and death, if sin 
Knew not the dread rebuke within, 
The pang of merciful discipline ? 

J. G. WmmEE. 

29 April. To be incapable of temptation is 
the privilege of involuntary creatures ; a man, or 
an angel, dares not desire it. So long as he feels 
Who it is that has made him capable of such 
danger. Who has given him a will, he is safe ; 
for his life is a prayer that he may not be left to 

his own guidance. F. D. Maurice. 

The idea that the gods hate and punish the 
desire of sin as itself a sin, is the germ of all 
spirituality. Duty, from having been finite, be- 
comes an infinite thing. Sin also enlarges its 
dimensions proportionablyo F Newman. 

30 April. When you have closed your 
doors and made darkness within, remember never 
to say that you are alone. For you are not alone. 
God, too, is present there, and your guardian 
spirit : and what need have they of light to see 
what you are doing ? Emctbtus. 

Yield all the days their dues, 
But when the evening light is lost, or dim. 
Commune with your own spirit, and with Him ! 
Restore your soul with stiUness, as is meet. 



NATURE AND OURSELVES. 75 

And when the sun bids forth, haste not to show 
Your strength, but kneel for blessing ere you go, 
And meekly bind the sandals on your feet. 

Thomas Ashe. 



FIFTH MONTH. 



The loveliest time of the year is also its busi- 
est working-time. During the fresh days of 
spring, Beauty and Toil walk hand in hand. 
The sweetness that fills the atmosphere comes 
from the steady, noiseless movement of all the 
working-forces of the earth and the heavens. 

In underground laboratories, in glowing sun- 
crucibles, powers both infinite and infinitesimal 
are weaving a garment of glory for the world — 
a seamless garment, of one texture throughout ; 
— for the rose-tinted petal of the wild anemone 
and the blush-pink concave of the May morning 
sky attest themselves to be of one tissue, one 
piece. 

Everything helps, — each for the whole, and 
all for each : the raindrop distilling through the 
soil to the plant's root, the breeze that wins forth 
the leaves with its restless murmur, and plant 
and leaf hastening upward with joyful persist- 
ence to sweeten raindrop and breeze with subtle 
essences which their fine chemistries have won 
from the clod. 

It is work, transmuting life into beauty and 
power, that keeps human souls fresh with peren- 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW, 77 

nial spring-time growth, that makes man know 
himself a sharer in the creative energies of God, 
His co-laborer as well as His offspring. 



MAY. 

SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 

1 May. How mankind defers from day to 
day the best it can do, and the most beautiful 
things it can enjoy, without thinking that every 
day may be the last one, and that lost time is 
lost eternity ! max Muller. 

Every day is a fresh beginning ; 

Every morn is the world made new : 
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning, 

Here is a beautiful hope for you — 
A hope for me, and a hope for you. 

Every day is a fresh beginning : 
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain. 

And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning. 
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain, 

Take heart with the day, and begin again ! 

Susan CooLrooB. 

The fairest day that ever yet has shone 

Will be when thou the day within shalt see ; 

The fairest rose that ever yet has blown. 

When thou the flower thou lookest on shalt be. 

Jones Very. 

2 May. '^ No day is commonplace, if we had 
only eyes to see its splendor." 



78 BECKONINGS. 

'T is always morning somewhere, and above 
The awakening continents, from shore to shore, 
Somewhere the birds are singing evermore. 

H. W. Longfellow. 

Lo ! here hath been dawning another blue day : 

Think ! wilt thou let it slip useless away ? 

Out of eternity this new day is born : 

Into eternity this night 't will return. 

See it aforetime no eye ever did ; 

So soon it forever from all eyes is hid. 

Here hath been dawning another blue day : 

Think ! wilt thou let it slip useless away ? 

Thomas Caelyle. 

3 May. The wind that blew from the sun- 
rise made me hope in the God who had first 
breathed into my nostrils the breath of life, — 
that He would at length so fill me with His 
breath that I should think only His thoughts, 
and live His life, finding therein my own life, 
only glorified infinitely. What should we poor 
humans do without our God's nights and morn- 
ings ? George MacDonald. 

Walk with thy fellow-creatures : note the hush 
And whisperings among them. Not a spring 

Or leaf but hath his morning hymn. Each bush 
And oak doth know I AM. Canst thou not 

sing ? Heney Vaughan. 

To hear the lark's song, we must be 
At heaven's gate with the lark. 

Alice Oabt. 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 79 

4 May. As a look will reveal what no word 
can ever speak, so will a scent, a sound, the 
spring's warm breath, the green unraveling of 
the larch-bough, a sudden whisper in the summer 
leaves, the birds' clear song at early morning, 
bring our souls into contact with the illimitable, 
telling us that we are one with ourselves, with 
nature, and with God. These things have power 
to call forth a music within us, which has not yet 
had words set to it. Dora Greenwell. 

" With wakeful life the earth's warm pulses stir ; 
Brown buds unroll bright banners on the 
air; 
And countless fairy fingers, dripping myrrh, 

The summer's robes prepare. 
Impatient soul, weak and complaining still, 

Are all thy hopes, slow struggling to the light, 
Less worth than these frail buds no frost could 
kill, 
Or wind of winter blight ? 
We pray for growth and strength; grief's 
dreaded showers 
May be, in God's wise purpose, ripening rain ; 
He only knows how all our highest powers 
Are perfected by pain." 

6 May. 

With other ministrations thou, Nature, 

Healest thy wandering and distempered child. 

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, 

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, 



80 BECKONINGS. 

Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, 
Till he relent, and can no more endure 
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing 
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy. 

S. T. Coleridge. 

Is this a time to be cloudy and sad, 

When our mother Nature laughs around ; 

When even the deep blue heavens look glad, 
And gladness breathes from the blossoming 

ground ? W. C. Bryant. 

6 May. I am heartily sorry for those persons 
who are constantly talking of the perishable na- 
ture of things and the nothingness of human life : 
for, for this very end we are here, to stamp the 
perishable with an imperishable worth ; and this 
can only be done by taking a just estimate of 

both. Goethe. 

I think we are too ready with complaint 

In this fair world of God's. 

Be comforted ! 
And like a cheerful traveler, take the road. 

Singing beside the hedge ! What if the bread 
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod 

To meet the flints ? At least it may be said, 
" Because the way is short, I thank Thee, God." 

Mrs. Browning. 

7 May. We should love God's gifts and de- 
nials ; love what He wishes and what He does 
not wish. jouBERT. 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 81 

Thou, that hast given so much to me, 
Give one thing more, a grateful heart ! 

— Not thankful when it pleaseth me, — 

But such a heart, whose pulse shall be Thy 
praise I Geoege Herbert. 

8 May. The grand difficulty is, to feel the 
reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due 
place in our thoughts and feelings ; to keep our 
mind's eye and our heart's eye ever fixed on the 
Land of Promise, without looking away from the 
road along which we are to travel towards it. 

Hare. 

I have learned to seek my happiness by limit- 
ing my desires, rather than in attempting to sat- 
isfy them. John Stuart Mill. 

9 May. There is no better test of men's 
progress than this advancing power to do with- 
out the things which used to be essential to their 
lives. As we climb a high mountain, we must 
keep our footing strong upon one ledge until we 
have fastened ourselves strongly on the next. 
Then we may let the lower foot-hold go. The 
lives of men who have been always growing are 
strewed along their whole course with the things 

which they have learned to do without. 

Phillips Brooks. 

Be like the bird, that, halting in her flight 

Awhile on boughs too slight, 
Feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, 

Knowing that she hath wings. Victor Hugo. 



82 BECKONINGS. 

10 May. By two wings a man is lifted up 
from the earthly; namely, by simplicity and 
purity. Simplicity ought to be in our intention ; 
purity in our affections. Simplicity doth tend 
towards God ; purity doth apprehend and taste 

Him. Thomas a. Kempis. 

Lord, he loveth Thee less, that loveth anything 
with Thee, which he loveth not for Thee. 

Who created all things, is better than all 
things ; who beautified all things, is more beau- 
tiful than all things ; who made strength, is 
stronger than all things. Whatsoever thou lov- 
est, that is He to thee. 

Learn to love the Workman in His work, the 
Creator in His creature. Let not that which 
was made by Him possess thee, lest thou lose 

Him by whom thyself was made. Saint Augustine. 

11 May. Great is he who enjoys his earthen- 
ware as if it were plate, and not less great is the 
man to whom all his plate is no more than earth- 
enware. Seneca. 

I found this, 
That of goods I could not miss 
If I fell within the line ; 
Once a member, all was mine ; 
Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains, 
Fortune's delectable mountains ; 
But if I would walk alone ; 
Was neither cloak or crumb my own. 

R. W. Emekson. 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 83 

12 May. A weak mind sinks under prosper- 
ity, as well as under adversity. A strong and 
deep one has two highest tides, — when the moon 
is at the full, and when there is no moon. Hare. 

Wealth is a means, and life the end ; 

You lose your hoard, have what you spend. 

For that unhappy mortal pray, 

Who never learned to give away ! 

His heaped-up wealth made him its slave ; 

He did not use, who never gave. Saadi. 

Let him be rich and weary, that at least. 
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness 
May toss him to My breast ! 

George Herbert. 

13 May. The heart may be engaged in a 
little business as much, if thou watch it not, as 
in many and great affairs. A man may drown 
in a little brook or pool, as well as in a great 
river, if he be down and plunge himself into it, 
and put his head under water. 

Some care thou must have, that thou mayest 
not care. Those things that are thorny, indeed, 
thou must make a hedge of them to keep out 
those temptations that accompany sloth, and ex- 
treme want that waits on it. But let them be 
the hedge ; suffer them not to grow within the 
garden. Leighton. 

14 May. God is commanding us off, every 
hour of our lives, toward things eternal, there to 



84 BECKONINGS. 

find our good, and build our rest. Sometimes 
He does it by taking us out of the world, and 
sometimes by taking the world out of us. 

H. BUSHNELL. 

Let us rejoice that we are poor, 

And have no gold to keep ; 
We do not need to bar the door 

Ere we can go to sleep : 
Who bars his door doth bar his mind, 
And shuts it against human kind ; 
Even the turning of a key 
Contracts the mind's humanity. 

ROBEBT LeIGHTON. 

15 May. Those who always love have not 
the leisure to complain and to be unhappy. 

JOUBERT. 

Weeping for a night alone endureth ; 

God at last shall bring a morning hour : 
In the frozen buds of every winter 

Sleep the blossoms of a future flower. 

Mbs. H. B. Stowe. 

16 May. There is but one way for the soul 
to escape from the iUs of life ; it is to escape 
from its pleasures, and to seek enjoyment higher 

up. JOUBEET. 

Then, fainting soul, arise and sing ! 
Mount, but be sober on the wing ! 
Mount up, for heaven is won by prayer ; 
Be sober, for thou art not there ! 
Till death the weary spirit free. 
Thy God hath said 't is good for thee 
To walk by faith and not by sight : 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 85 

Take it on trust a little while ! 
Soon shalt thou read the mystery right, 
In the full sunshine of His smile. Keblb. 

17 May. A gay, serene spirit is the source 
of all that is noble and good. Whatever is ac- 
complished of the greatest and noblest sort flows 
from such a disposition. Petty, gloomy souls, 
that only mourn the past and dread the future, 
are not capable of seizing upon the holiest mo- 
ments of life, of enjoying and making use of 
them as they should. Frederick von Schiller. 

The world is all too sad for tears ; 

I would not weep, not I ! 
But smile along my life's short road, 

Until I smiling die. 
The little flowers breathe fragrance out 

Through all the dewy night ; 
Shall I more churlish be than they, 

And 'plain for constant light ? 
Not so ! not so ! no load of woe 

Need bring despairing frown ; 
For while we bear it, we can bear ; 

Past that, we lay it down. 

Sarah Williams. 

18 May. Nothing that has ever lived is lost, 
nothing is useless ; not a sigh, a joy, or a sorrow 
which has not served its purpose. Our tears are 
numbered, the fragrance of our innocent pleas- 
ures mounts heavenward as a sweet-smelling sa- 
vor. Let us take courage. Honest labor, up- 



86 BECKONINGS. 

right thoughts, healthy emotions endure. Let us 
give, love, become as little children ! so shall we 
reach self-forgetfulness, that supreme possession, 
that dominion over the universe. 

Madame de Gaspaein. 

There shall never be one lost good ! What was, 

shall live as before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying 

sound ; 
What was good, shall be good, with for evil so 

much good more ; 
On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heavens, a 

perfect round. robeet BKowNma. 

19 May. Some very excellent people tell you 
they dare not hope. To me it seems much more 

impious to despair. Sydney Smith. 

Say not the struggle naught availeth. 

The labor and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth. 

And as things have been, they remain. 
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 

Seem here no painful inch to gain. 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 

Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

A. H. Clough. 

20 May. It is impossible for that man to de 
spair who remembers that his Helper is omnipo- 
tent. Jeeemy Taylob. 

More than our feeble hearts can ever pine 
For holiness, 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 87 

The Father in his tenderness divine 

Yearneth to bless. 
He never sends a joy not meant in love ; 

Still less a pain ; 
Our gratitude the sunlight falls to prove ; 

Our faith the rain. Frances power Cobbb. 

21 May. As in nature the fierce rain, the 
wild wind, the raging fire, are often indispensable 
instruments for the purification of rivers, the in- 
vigoration of health, the reformation of cities, so 
also it is in individual experience. In our own 
lives how often it is that we come across what 
have been finely called " veiled angels : " 

" We know how radiant and how kind 
Their faces are, those veils behind ; 
We trust those veils, one happy day, 
In heaven and earth will pass away." 

Dean Stanley. 

22 May. Give God thanks for every weak- 
ness, deformity, and imperfection, and accept it 
as a favor and grace of God, and an instrument 
to resist pride and nurse humility ; ever remem- 
bering that when God, by giving thee a crooked 
back, hath also made thy spirit stoop, or less 
vain, thou art more ready to enter the narrow 
gate of heaven than by being straight, and stand- 
ing upright, and thinking highly. Jeremy Taylor. 

But all God's angels come to us disguised ; 
Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 



88 BECKO^TXGS. 

One after other lift their frowning masks, 

And we behold the seraph's face beneath. 

All radiant with the glory and the calm 

Of having looked upon the front of God. 

J. R. Lowell. 

23 May. It is said that gardeners, some- 
times, when they would bring a rose to richer 
flowering, deprive it for a season, of light and 
moisture. Silent and dark it stands, dropping 
one fading leaf after another, and seeming to go 
patiently down to death. But when every leaf 
is dropped, and the plant stands stripped to the 
uttermost, a new life is even then working in 
the buds, from which shall spring a tenderer foli- 
age and a brighter wealth of flowers. So, often, 
in celestial gardening, every leaf of earthly joy 
must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits 

the soul. Haeeizt Beecheb Stowk. 

" Is it raining, little flower ? — 

Be glad of rain I 
Too much sun would wither thee ; 

'T will shine again. 
The sky is very black, 't is true ; 
But just behind it shines the blue. 

Art thou weary, tender heart ? — 

Be glad of pain I 
In sorrow sweetest things will grow, 

As flowers in rain. 
God watches ; and thou wilt have sun. 
When clouds their perfect work have done." 



SUNBEAM AND SHApOW. 89 

24 May. We rejoice in life because it seems 
to be carrying us somewhere ; because its dark- 
ness seems to be rolling on towards light, and 
even its pain to be moving onward to a hidden 
joy. Phillips Beooks. 

The light of smiles shall fill again 
The lids that overflow with tears ; 

And weary hours of woe and pain 
Are promises of happier years. 

There is a day of sunny rest 

For every dark and troubled night ; 

And grief may bide an evening guest, 

But joy shall come with early light. 

W. C. Bryant. 

25 May. That man is perfect in faith who 
can come to God in the utter dearth of his feel- 
ings and his desires, without a glow or an aspi- 
ration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, 
neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to 
Him, " Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my 

home." George MacDonald. 

Nothing before, nothing behind ; 

The steps of Faith 
Fall on the seeming void, and find 

The rock beneath. J. G. Whittier. 

26 May. To him to whom life is but an 
episode, a short stage in the existence of eternity, 
who is always cognizant of the great surround- 
ing world of mystery, grief comes as angels came 



90 BECKONINGS. 

to the tent of Abraham. Laughter is hushed 
before them. The mere frolic of life stands still, 
but the soul takes the grief in as a guest, meets 
it at the door, kisses its hand, washes its travel- 
stained face, spreads the table with the best food, 
gives it the seat by the fireside, and listens rev- 
erently for what it has to say about the God 

from whom it came. Phillips Beooks. 

We can hardly learn humility and tenderness 
enough except by suffering. Geoege eliot. 

When God afflicts thee, think He hews a rugged 

stone. 
Which must be shaped, or else aside as useless 

thrown. R. C. Trench. 

27 May. There are hours when the whole 
world and all it contains shrivels to nothingness, 
and God alone fills the mind, — hours of human 
desolation, seasons of strange, mysterious exalta- 
tion, times of earthly despair or of joy ; the height 
and excess of any emotion bears us away into a 
region where God Himself dwells. But even if 
we have taught ourselves to make the impression 
of these hours constant, there is still an unsatisfied 
element in the knowledge. We long for more, 
for nearness, for sight, or something that stands 
for sight, for the Father at hand, and the home 
of the soul. The unrest of this weary world is 
its unvoiced cry after God. t. t. Munger. 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 91 

28 May. There is in man a higher than 
love of happiness ; he can do without happiness, 
and instead thereof find blessedness ! Was it not 
to preach forth this same Higher that sages and 
martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times 
have spoken and suffered, — bearing testimony 
through life and through death, of the Godlike 
that is in man, and how in the Godlike only has 
he strength and freedom ? Carlylk. 

How dark the discipline of pain, 



Were not the suffering followed by the sense 
Of infinite rest and infinite release ! 

This is our consolation ; and again 
A great soul cries to us in our suspense, 
" I came from martyrdom unto this peace ! " 

H. W. Longfellow. 

29 May. What is it that can convert the 
complaints of mankind into a song of triumph ? 
I know of nothing but the old, old story of the 
Death, and Resurrection, and Ascension of our 
Lord, impressed on us by the Holy Spirit ; the 
assurance that self-sacrificing love, which has 
sounded the depths of human sin and misery and 
has not been overcome by them, is supreme in 
God's universe, and destined to complete domin- 
ion. W. H. Freemantle. 

Take me, Oh Infinite Cause, and cleanse me of 
wrong ! 

Take me, raise me to higher life through centu- 
ries long ! 



92 



BECKONINGS. 



Cleanse me, by pain, if need be, through aeons of 

days ! 
Take me and purge me, still will I answer with 

praise — 

There is no Death forever ! 

Edwin Mobrib. 

30 May. Let the cross of Christ teach us to 
look calmly on this suffering world ! Life is full 
of trials, and it is a perplexing thing to look 
around us and see the race of man groaning 
under their burden. We know but one satisfac- 
tory explanation of this strange mystery — thor- 
oughly satisfactory — which calms all doubt. 
The cross of Christ is the explanation. The 
cross is the distinct announcement to us, of that 
wonderful law which fills all life, that '' through 
much tribulation we must enter into the king- 
dom of heaven." Perfection through suffering, 
— that is the doctrine of the cross. There is 
love in that law. f. w. Robektson. 

31 May. 

A second voice was at mine ear ; 
A little whisper, silvery clear, 
A murmur, *^ Be of better cheer." 

As from some blissful neighborhood, 
A notice faintly understood, 
" I see the end and know the good." 



A little hint to solace woe, 
A hint, a whisper breatliing low, 
" I may not speak of what I know ! 



SUNBEAM AND SHADOW. 93 

Like an ^olian harp, that wakes 

No certain air, but overtakes 

Far thought with music that it makes, — 

Such seemed the whisper at my side : 
" What is 't thou knowest, sweet voice ? " I 

cried ; 
" A hidden hope/' the voice replied. 

Tennyson. 



SUMMER. 



Three breezy steps, and on a sunlit floor 
Bordered with daisies, roses, and green grass, 

The maiden Year, at summer's open door 

Hears music summoning up the mountain-pass. 

And on she climbs ; soft strains the thickets thrill : 

Elusive airy visions flit beyond : 
The forest-path invites her upward stiU ; 

Light tendrils cling to her, with touches fond. 

O the enchanted world ! youth ! June ! 

No wonder that the heart cannot forget 
Those morning melodies, that first-learned tune ! 

Through deepening harmonies they haunt her yet ! 



SIXTH MONTH. 



Life ! Life ! " is the song of opening summer. 
Hitherto all has been struggle, hope, aspiration 
towards a mysterious future. But now the blos- 
som feels in itself the answer to the bygone per- 
plexities of climbing stem and timidly-unfolding 
bud. 

Life I Life ! The sun descending into the 
heart of the flower, and the flower drinking in the 
joy of sunshine, and the breath of the heavens 
whispering through all, rapture, and freedom, 
and peace ! 

Life ! What definition has ever given the 
faintest approach to the meaning of that supreme 
word ? It is an experience which overfloods and 
sweeps away all definitions. 

Human personality is the flower which all 
other blossoms hint at and prefigure. There is 
a June for every soul to fill with its own pecul- 
iar life and perfume ; a summer wherein the 
lowliest being may be gladdened with the splen- 
dors of the Divine Presence. 

Soul, receive into thyself the warm and radiant 
life of heaven, to breathe it out again as spiritual 
fragrance over other lives, and so change this 



96 BECKONINGS. 

wilderness-world into the garden of the Lord! 
This is the lovely moral which hides within the 
roses of June, and makes more than half their 
sweetness. 



JUNE. 

BLOSSOM-TIME. 
1 June. 
How beautiful it is to be alive ! 

To wake, each morn, as if the Maker's grace 
Did us afresh from nothingness derive, 

That we might sing, " How happy is our case ! 
How beautiful it is to be alive ! " 
To read in some good book, until we feel 

Love for the one who wrote it ; then to kneel 
Close unto Him whose love our soul doth shrive ; 

While every moment's joy doth more reveal 
How beautiful it is to be alive. 
Thus ever towards man's height of nobleness 

Striving some new progression to contrive, 
Till, just as any other friend's, we jDress 

Death's hand ; and having died, feel none the 
less 
How beautiful it is to be alive. h. s. Sutton. 

2 June. It is good for a man perplexed and 
lost among many thoughts to come into closer 
intercourse with Nature, and to learn her ways 
and to catch her spirit. It is no fancy to believe 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 97 

that if the children of this generation are taught 
a great deal more than we used to be taught of 
nature, and the ways of God in nature, they will 
be provided with the material for far healthier, 
happier, and less perplexed and anxious lives 
than some of us are living. Phillips Beooks. 

One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 

Of moral evil and of good. 

Than all the sages can. Wordsworth. 

3 June. It is not possible for a Christian 
man to walk across so much as a rood of the 
natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly 
poised, without receiving strength and hope from 
some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a 
sense of a dew falling on him out of the sky. It 
seems to me that the real sources of bluntness in 
the feelings towards the splendor of the grass 
and glory of the flower are less to be found in 
ardor of occupation, in seriousness of compassion, 
or heavenliness of desire, than in the turning of 
the eye at intervals of rest too selfishly within. 

John Ruskin. 

4 June. 

If thou art worn, and hard beset 

With troubles that thou wouldst forget. 

If thou wouldst read a lesson that will keep 

Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep. 

Go to the woods and hills ! no tears 

Dim the sweet look that Nature wears. 

H. W. Longfellow. 



98 BECKONINGS. 

Soar with the birds, and flutter with the leaf ! 

Dance with the seeded grass in fringy play 1 
Sail with the cloud, wave with the dreaming 
pine, 

And float with Nature all the livelong day 1 
Call not such hours an idle waste of time ! 

Land that lies fallow gains a quiet power ; 
It treasures, from the brooding of God's wings, 

Strength to unfold the future tree and flower. 

Mrs. H. B. Stowb. 

5 June. One would almost fancy that the 
sky and air were full of feeling and thought. 
How can they have so much expression of the 
soul, without any soul ? Speaking of flowers, 
Wilberforce said that they seemed to him " like 
the smile on the Father's countenance." So all 
the beauty of the sky and the earth is like the 
smile of God ; and a smile shows us the disposi- 
tion of the person just as certainly as any words 
he can use. This accounts for the expression 
spoken of. One cannot sit down in the midst of 
this loveliness without being conscious that it is a 

Divine Presence that makes it lovely. 

Henry Ware, Jr. 

I cannot tell what you say, green leaves, 

I cannot tell what you say ; 
But I know that there is a spirit in you, 

And a word in you this day. 

I cannot tell what you say, rosy rocks, 

I cannot tell what you say ; 
But I know that there is a spirit in you, 

And a word in you this day. 

Charles Kingsley. 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 99 

6 June. It is a true instinct when men are 
led to regard the beauty of the world that comes 
to them through the eye, and the moral light 
which shines from behind upon the soul, as com- 
ing from one centre, and leading upward to the 
thought of one Being who is above both. In 
this way all visible beauty becomes a hint and a 

foreshadowing of something more than itself. 

J. C. Shairp. 

No mere machine is Nature, 

Wound up, and left to play ; 
No wind-harp swept at random 

By airs that idly stray ; 
A spirit sways the music, — 

A hand is on the chords ; 
Oh, bow thy head and listen ! 

That hand — it is the Lord's. 

Mrs. Charles. 

7 June. Every existing thing or object in 
the created empire of God, all forms, colors, 
heights, weights, magnitudes, forces, come out of 
God's mind covered all over with tokens, satu- 
rated aU through with flavors of His intelligence. 
They represent God's thought, — the invisible 
things of God ; and an angel coming out into the 
world, instead of seeing nothing in them but only 
walls, would see God expressed by them, just as 
we are expressed by our faces and bodies. The 
invisible things of God, all His eternal realities, 
would be clearly seen. h. Bushnell. 

Nothing 's small ! 
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, 



100 BECKONINGS. 

But finds some coupling with the spinning stars ; 
No pebble at your feet but proves a sphere ; 
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim. 

Earth 's cranmied with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God. 

Mes. E. B. Browxenq. 

8 June. Every rose is an autograph from 
the hand of the Almighty God. The universe 
itself is a great autograph of the Almighty. 

Theodore Parker. 

" God of the granite and the rose ! 
Soul of the sparrow and the bee ! 
The mighty tide of being flows, 

Through countless channels, Lord, from 
Thee. 
It leaps to life in grass and flowers ; 

Through every grade of being runs ; 
While from creation's radiant towers 
Its glory streams in stars and suns." 

9 June. If I am spiritual, then the world 
is a revelation of God to me ; and there is a 
spirit looks in upon my spirit from out of the 
sky, and the earth and the sea, fi^om out of the 
sun and the moon, and from out of the rose. 

MOUNTFORD. 

God's Spirit faUs on me as dew-drops on a rose, 
If I but like a rose my heart to him unclose. 

AXGELUS SiLBSIUS. 

10 June. Flowers are the beautiful hiero- 
glyphics of Nature, with which she indicates how 
much she loves us. Gobthb. 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 101 

The wild white rosebud in my hand 
Hath meanings meant for me alone, 

Which no one else can understand : 
To you it breathes with altered tone. 

Owen Meredith. 

11 June. The world is the vesture of the 
unseen God ; its whole atmosphere is charged 
with His presence. Whoever, in humble faith, 
and with a heart which longs for truth and good- 
ness, opens his mouth and draws in his breath, 
that man is straightway filled, not with some 
vague influence only, but with all the fullness of 
God. The desire and the power to do right 
which he acquires is none other than the central 
force which animates the world. He lives and 
moves in God. w. h. Freemantle. 

For oh, but the world is fair, is fair ! 

And oh, but the world is sweet ! 
I will out in the gold of the blossoming mould, 

And sit at the Master's feet. 
And the love that my heart would speak 

I will fold in the lily's rim. 
That the lips of the blossoms, more pure and 
meek. 

May offer it up to Him ! Ina d. coolbrith. 

12 June. If I knew all that is to be learned 
from a daisy even, I should be less a stranger to 
God than I am. All about me, tree unto tree is 
uttering speech, and flower unto flower is show- 
ing knowledge. But it is in a language that I 



102 BECKONINGS. 

do not understand, but which I shall remember ; 
and so which I shall learn the whole meaning of 
hereafter. Motinttord. 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand : 
Little flower, if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is, 

Alfeed Tennyson. 

13 June. I have some favorite flowers in 
spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the 
harebell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the 
budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 
view and hang over with particular delight. I 
never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew 
in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of 
a troop of gTay plover in an autumnal morning, 
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthu- 
siasm of devotion or poetry. Do these workings 
argue something within us above the trodden 
clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of 
those awful and important realities ; — a God 
that made all things, man's immaterial and im- 
mortal nature. Robert Burns. 

Flowers are not flowers unto the poet's eyes ; 

Their beauty thrills him by an inward sense ; 
He knows that outward seemings are but lies. 

Or, at the most, but earthly shadows, whence 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 103 

The soul that looks within for truth may guess 
The presence of some wondrous heavenliness. 

J. R. Lowell. 

14 June. 

" There is religion in a flower ; 
Its still, small voice is as the voice of conscience ; 
Mountains and oceans, planets, suns, and systems, 
Bear not the impress of Almighty power 
In characters more legible than those 
Which He hath written on the tiniest flower 
Whose light bell bends beneath the dew-drop's 
weight." 

'Neath cloistered boughs, each floral bell that 
swingeth 
And tolls its perfume on the passing air. 
Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth 

A call to prayer. Horace Smith. 

15 June. It is our Maker's care that plants 
alike thorns and flowers in our path. To reject 
His flowers would be none the less unfilial than 
to repine at His thorns. Frances power Cobbe. 

The flowers, still faithful to the stems, 

Their fellowship renew ; 
The stems are faithful to the root 

That worketh out of view ; 
And to the rock the root adheres. 

In every fibre true. 
Close clings to earth the living rock, 

Though threatening still to fall ; 



104 BECKONINGS. 

The earth is constant to her sphere, 
And God upholds them all. 

WOEDS^OBXa 

16 June. Instead of complaming that the 
rose has thorns, I congratulate myself that the 
thorn is surmounted by roses, and that the bush 
bears flowers. Joubert. 

The grass is softer to my tread 

For rest it yields unnumbered feet ; 

Sweeter to me the wild rose red 

Because she makes the whole world sweet. 

Why so sad a moan ? 

Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown. 

Keats. 

Even for the dead I will not bind 
My soul to grief ; death cannot long divide : 

For is it not as if the rose that climbed 
My garden-wall, had bloomed the other side ? 

AucE Cabey. 

17 June. The Divine Spirit permeates every 
pore of matter and of humanity, and yet is abso- 
lutely different fi'om both. There is no lily in the 
field and no rose in the valley whose bloom and 
fragrance do not come from the breath of Infi- 
nite Beauty. There is no beauty, no wisdom, no 
faithfulness, no purit^^, no j^iet^^ and self-sacrifice 
that is not inspired by Him. The goodness of 
all the good is a ray of reflection fi^om Him ; the 
greatness of all the great points to His throne on 

high. p. C. MOZOOMDAE. 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 105 

To win the secret of a weed's plain heart 

Reveals some clew to spiritual things 

J. R. Lowell. 

18 June. Oh, forests, with your fresh cool- 
ness ; glades, with tempered light, filled with 
winged creatures rejoicing in their life of a day ; 
mountains, with grassy summits, majesty of peaks 
of snow ; ineffable charm of the valley ; blue 
lakes, entranced, looking up to and reflecting the 
sky, — my God made you what you are. 

It is God who will create the new earth. Our 
low prose effaces your poetry. The hymn which 
rises from your solitudes is overpowered by our 
jarring voices. Your flowers pass away ; the 
flowers of Paradise will be sweeter still, and will 
never fade. Madame de Gasparin. 

19 June. 

And the old warfare from within that had gone 
on so long, — 

The wasting of the inner strife, the sting of out- 
ward wrong, — 

Went with me o'er the breezy hill, went with me 
up the glade ; 

I found not God among the trees, and yet I was 
afraid. 

I mused, and fire that smouldered long within my 

breast brake free ; 
I said, "O God, Thy works are good, but yet 

they are not Thee ; 
Still greater to the sense is that which breathes 

through every part ; 



106 BECKONINGS. 

Still sweeter to the heart than all is He who made 
the heart ! " Doea Grebis^ell. 

20 June. Bright as are the sun, the sky, 
and the clouds ; green as are the leaves and the 
fields ; sweet as is the singing of the birds ; we 
know that they are not all, and we will not take 
up with a part for the whole. They proceed 
from a centre of love and goodness, which is 
God Himself ; but they are not His fullness ; they 
speak of heaven, but they are not heaven ; they 
are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His 
image. J. H. Newman. 

O ye trees that wave and glisten round ! 

O ye waters gurgling down the dell ! 
Pulses throb in every sight and sound ; 

Living Nature 's more than magic spell. 
Yet, O Nature, less is all of thine 

Than thy borrowings from the human breast ; 

Thou, O God, hast made Thy child divine ; 

And for him his world Thou hallowest. 

John Sterling. 

21 June. More than mere growth is expected 
of a plant. Healthy juices may be in its veins, 
it may have vigor sufficient for its own suste- 
nance, and yet be no ornament, but an incum- 
brance to the place it fills. Flower or fruit, some 
loveliness of tint, some grace of waving spray or 
comforting shade, we always look for in the 
growths of earth. 

And so of spiritual development. More than 



BLOSSOM-TIME. 107 

mere living, more than mere inward satisfaction, 
is required of us. Our best gifts, those that we 
count as peculiarly ours, are not for ourselves 
alone. They are hardly our own, until they have 
found expression in blossom and fruitage. Our 
prayer must be not only " Let Thy life be within 
us ! " but also, " Let the beauty of the Lord our 
God be upon us ! " 

Heaven does with us as we with torches do. 
Not light them for themselves. For if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike 
As if we had them not. Shakespeare. 

22 June. 

The secret that doth make a flower a flower, 

So frames it that to bloom is to be sweet, 

And to receive, to give. 
No soil so sterile, and no living lot 
So poor, but it hath somewhat still to spare 

In bounteous odors. s. Dobbll. 

The flower shines not for itself at all ; 

Its joy is the joy it freely diffuses ; 
Of beauty and balm it is prodigal ; 

And it lives' in the life it sweetly loses. 
No choice for the rose but glory or doom : 
To exhale or smother, to wither or bloom. 
To give, is to live ; 
To deny, is to die. h. w. pabker. 

23 June. " All beautiful things bring sad- 



108 BECKONINGS. 

ness." And why ? Because of what they are, 
and yet are not. Every rose-breath, every waft 
of the hidden melody of woodland brooks, every 
glimpse of sunset-glory beyond the hiUs, is a hint 
of the Infinite, that, in the very joy it brings, 
emphasizes the pathos of the unattained. When 
the year is in its full and perfect bloom, its deep- 
est suggestion is of some ineffable sweetness, 
some flower of spiritual light, half-revealed, re- 
treating into unseen heavens, forever beyond our 
reach. The truest enjoyment of the earthly is 
but the ache of the heart for the heavenly. 

24 June. Midsummer Day, St. John the 

Baptist. 

Now is the high tide of the year. 

And whatever of Hfe hath ebbed away, 
Comes floating back with a ripply cheer, 

Into every inlet, creek, and bay ; 
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it : 
We are happy now because God wills it. 
'T is as easy now for the heart to be true 
As for grass to be green, or skies to be blue ; 
'T is the natural way of living. J. R. Lowell. 

25 June. 

There are flowers in the meadow, 
There are clouds in the sky ; 

Songs pour from the woodland ; 
The waters glide by : — 

Too many, too many 
For eye or for ear. 



BLOSSOM-TIME 109 

The sights that we see 

And the sounds that we hear. 

Jones Vert. 

Everywhere the gate of Beauty- 
Fresh across the pathway swings, 

As we follow truth or duty 
Inward to the heart of things ; 

And we enter, foolish mortals. 

Thinking now the heart to find, — 

There to gaze on vaster portals ! 

Still the glory lies behind ! 

W. C. Gannett. 

26 June. Each of us is a distinct flower or 
tree in the spiritual garden of God, — precious 
each for his own sake in the eyes of Him who is 
even now making us, — each of us watered and 
shone upon and filled with life for the sake of his 
flower, his completed being, which will blossom 
out of him at last to the glory and pleasure of 
the great Gardener. For each has within him a 
secret of the Divinity ; each is growing towards 
the revelation of that secret to himself, and so to 
the full reception, according to his measure, of 
the Divine. 

And what an end lies before us ! To have 
a consciousness of our own ideal being flashed 
through us from the thought of God ! Surely, 
for this may well give way all our paltry self- 
consciousness, our self-admiration, and self-wor- 
ships ! Surely, to know what He thinks about us 
will pale out of our souls all our thoughts about 

ourselves I George MacDonald. 



110 BECKONIXGS. 

27 June. We are like southern plants taken 
up to a northern climate and planted in a north- 
ern soil. They grow there, but they are always 
failing of their flowers. The poor exiled slirub 
dreams by a native longing of a splendid blossom 
which it has never seen, but is dimly conscious 
that it ought somehow to produce. It feels the 
flower which it has not strength to make in the 
half-chilled but still genuine juice of its southern 
nature. That is the way in which the ideal life, 
the life of fifll completions, haunts us aU. TTe 
feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the 

thing we are. Phillips Beooks. 

Every natural flower which grows on earth 
Implies a flower on the spiritual side. 
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow 
With blossoming causes, — not so far away 
That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared, 
May catch at something of the bloom and 

breath — 
Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed 
Still apprehended. Mbs. e. b. Brow>'ing. 

28 June. The Bible reveals that Christ, the 
Eternal Word, is in Nature. The world is but 
the form, of which Christ is the Personality ; the 
body, of which the soul is God; the outer ap- 
pearance, of which the reality is God, and which 
mediates between God and us. Beneath it all is 
Life, and that Life is God. The beauty of the 
sea-shell and of the field-flower is the loveliness 



BLOSSOM-TIME. Ill 

of God ; the Force which moves the waters ever- 
lastingly is the mighty movement of the One 
Living Being ; the instinct which brings the wild 
birds in long lines through heaven at the ap- 
pointed season, is the order of the mind of God 
in them, even though unknown to them. " He is 
in them, and they were made by Him, and they 
know Him not." F. W. Robertson. 

29 June. 

One Spirit — His 
Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows, 
Rules universal nature. Not a flower 
But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain, 
Of His unrivaled pencil. He inspires 
Their balmy odors, and imparts their hues, 
And bathes their eyes with nectar. 
Happy who walks with Him ! whom, what he 

finds 
Of flavor or of scent, in fruit or flower, 
Or what he views of beautiful or grand 
In nature, from the broad majestic oak 
To the green blade that twinkles in the sun. 
Prompts with remembrance of a present God. 

COWPER. 

30 June. 

Farewell, dear flowers I sweetly your time ye 

spent. 
Fit, while ye lived, for smell and ornament, 

And after death, for cures. 
I follow straight without complaints or grief ; 
Since, if my scent be good, I care not if 

It be as short as yours. George Herbert. 



112 BECKONINGS. 

The freshness that has cheered thy morning 
hours, 
The sunset glory that hath lit thine eye, 
The night-wind's voice, the sweet perfume of 
flowers, 
Have passed into thy life, no more to die, 
And shall be raised again, in that last day 
When thy first earth and heaven have fled away. 

Eliza Scuddeb. 



SEVENTH MONTH. 



The flood-tide of summer is upon the world. 
Earth sways dreamily on her own atmosphere 
among the stars, like the water-lily among her 
sister-blossoms upon the unruffled bosom of the 
lake. The white sails on the horizon are like 
lily-petals languidly drifted by their own breath 
along the breezeless shimmer of the sea. Nature, 
at the height and fullness of her beauty, like the 
enchanted princess, has fallen asleep among her 
flowers. 

It is the hour of peace which precedes the 
change from the morning to the afternoon of the 
year. For all things there is a noon-pause as well 
as a night-rest, — though but a half -sleep, thronged 
with wakeful dreams. The hours of early stir 
and activity are softly rounded by the resting- 
time that follows, — the pause of the soul where- 
in is heard, as of old, a Divine Voice at the 
centre of all creative effort and accomplishment, 
saying, in the calm of sacred meditation, '^ It is 
good." No man can say this of his own work ; 
but through the deep peace that embosoms his 
aspirations, he may listen for and hear the still, 



114 BECKONING S. 

small voice that, in its very whisper of approval, 
calls him to nobler and more earnest endeavor. 
Every true achievement has within it the seed of 
something better than itself. The loveliest of 
blossoms is but a cradle for the ripening fruit ; 
and in the fruit lies hidden the germ of unimag- 
ined summers yet to be. 



JULY. 
FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 

1 July. I fancy that until a man loves space, 
he will never be at peace in a place. At least so 
I have found it. I am content if you but give 

me room. George MacDonald. 

The health of the eye seems to demand a hori- 
zon. We are never tired, so long as we can see 
far enough. R. w. Emeeson. 

I love all waste 

And solitary places, where we taste 

The pleasure of believing what we see 

Is boundless as we wish our souls to be. 

Shelley. 

2 July. Nothing is so narrowing, contract- 
ing, hardening, as always to be moving in the 
same groove, with no thought beyond what we 
immediately see and hear close around us. Any 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 115 

shock which breaks this even course, anything 
which makes us think of other joys and sorrows 
besides our own, is of itself chastening, sanctify- 
ing, edifying. Dean Stanley. 

Let me not dwell so much within 

My bounded heart, with anxious heed, 
Where all my searches meet with sin, 

And nothing satisfies my need ! 
It shuts me from the sound and sight 
Of that pure world of life and light 
Which has no breadth, or length, or height. 

A. L. Waring. 

3 July. 

'T is liberty alone that gives the flower 
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, 
And we are weeds without it. 

COWPER. 

Though hearts brood o'er the past, our eyes 

With smiling futures glisten : 
For lo ! our day bursts up the skies ! 

Lean out your souls, and listen ! 
The world rolls Freedom's radiant way. 

And ripens with her sorrow : 
Take heart I who bear the cross to-day. 

Shall wear the crown to-morrow ! 

Gerald Massey. 

4 July. Independence Day, I call that mind 
free, which escapes the bondage of matter ; which, 
instead of stopping at the material universe and 
making it a prison-wall, passes beyond it to its 



116 BECKOXINGS. 

Author, and finds, in the radiant signatures which 
it everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps 
to its own spiritual enlargement. 

W. K CHAjonHOb 

He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, 

And all are slaves beside. 

His are the mountains, and the valleys his, 

And the resplendent rivers : his to enjoy, 

"Who. with a filial confidence inspired, 

Can lift to heaven an unpresmnptuous eye, 

Aud smiling say. — My Father made them alL 

None can love freedom heartily but good men ; 
the rest love not freedom, but license. 

JoBH MiunnL 

5 July. Suffice it for the joy of the miiverse 
that we have not arrived at a wall^ but at inter- 
minable oceans. R^ w. Eiceesos. 

Free-born, it is my purpose to die free. 

Away, degrading cares ! and you not less, — 

Delights of sense and gauds of world 1 in ess I 
I have no part in you. nor you in me. 

Are there no flowers on earth, in heaven no 
stars. 

That we must place in such low things our 

trust ? ArsBET DS Tbbk. 

6 July. Even-thing harmonizes with me. 
which is harmonious to thee. Universe ! Noth- 
ing for me is too early or too late which is in due 
time for thee. Evervthinof is fruit to me which 

thv seasons brinsr. 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 117 

The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops ; and wilt 
thou not say, Dear city of God ? Marcus Aureuus. 

Let me go where'er I will, 

I hear a sky-born music still. 

It is not only in the rose, 

It is not only in the bird, 

Not only where the rainbow glows, 

Nor in the song of woman heard ; 

But in the darkest, meanest things. 

There always, always something sings. 

R. W. Emerson. 

7 July. In many persons, and not in poets 
only, a beautiful sunrise, or a gorgeous sunset, or 
the starry heavens on a cloudless night, create 
moral impressions, and something more ; these 
sights suggest to them, if vaguely yet powerfully, 
the presence of Him from whom came both Na- 
ture and the emotions it awakens. The tender 
lights that fleet over sea and sky are to them 

* ' Signalings from some high land 
Of One they feel, but dimly understand. ' ' 

J. C. Shairp. 

More than clouds of purple trail 

In the gold of setting day ; 
More than gleams of wing or sail 

Beckon from the sea-mist gray : 
Glimpses of immortal youth. 

Gleams and glories seen and flown. 
Far-heard voices sweet with truth. 

Airs from viewless Eden blown. 

J. G. Whittier. 



I 



118 BECKOXIXGS. 

8 July. The question of beauty takes us out 
of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of 

things. Goethe said. *' The beautiful is a mani- 
festation of secret laws of nature, which, but for 
this appearance, had been forever concealed from 
us." The tint of the flower proceeds from its 
root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with 
its existence. R. ^. F.yp.Bsoy. 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever : 
Its loveliness increases : it will never 
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep 
A bower quiet for us. and a sleep 
FuH of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet 
breathing. Kkats, 

9 July. 

Beauty — a living Presence of the earth, 

Sur^Dassing the most fair ideal forms 

Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed 

From earth's materials — waits upon my steps. 

Pitches her tent before me as I move, 

An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves 

Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 

Sought in the Atlantic Main, — whv should they 

be 
A history only of departed things, 
Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
For the discerning intellect of man, 
When wedded to this goodly universe 
In love and holy passion, shall find these 
A simple produce of the common day. Wosdswobth. 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 119 

10 July. I suspect we shall find some day 
that the loss of the human paradise consists 
chiefly in the closing of the human eyes ; that at 
least far more of it than people think, remains 
about us still, only we are so filled with foolish 
desires and evil cares that we cannot see or hear, 
cannot even smell or taste, the pleasant things 

around us. George MacDonald. 

For, my God, Thy creatures are so frail, 

Thy bountiful creation is so fair, 
That, drawn before us like the temple-veil, 

It hides the Holy Place from thought and care, 
Giving man's eyes instead its sweeping fold, 
Rich as with cherub-wings, and apples wrought of 
gold. Jean Ingelow. 

11 July. This beauty of Nature which is 
seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The 
presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual, ele- 
ment is essential to its perfection. Beauty is the 
mark God sets upon virtue. R. w. Emerson. 

Never joy illumed my brow, 
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free 
This world from its dark slavery, 
That thou, O awful Loveliness, 
Wouldst give whatever these words jeannot ex- 
press. Shelley. 

12 July. Might but the sense of moral evil 
be as strong in me as is my delight in externcxl 

beauty ! Dr. Arnold. 



120 BECKOl^INGS. 

I will never believe that a man has a real love 
for the good and the beautiful except he attack 
the evil and the disgusting the moment he sees it. 

Chables Kingsley. 

But I, my God and my Glory, do hence also 
sing a hymn to Thee, and do consecrate praise 
to Him who consecrateth me, because those beau- 
tiful patterns which, through men's souls are con- 
veyed into their cunning hands, came from that 
Beauty which is above our souls, which my soul 
day and night sigheth after. St. Augustes-e, 

13 July. Nature is loved by what is best in 
us. It is loved as the city of God, although 
— or rather because — there is no citizen. The 
sunset is unlike anything underneath it; it wants 
men. And the beauty of nature must always 
seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has 
human figures that are as good as itself. 

R. w. Emebson. 

I long to see the hallowed earth 

In new creation rise ; 
To find the germs of Eden hid 

Where its fallen beauty lies ; — 
To feel the spring-tide of a soul. 

By one deep love set free, 
Made meet to lay aside her dust, 

And be at home with Thee ! a. l. waking. 

14 July. When tree, or river, or rock shows 
beauty, and my soul answers to it, it is as though 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AKD POETRY. 121 

the spirit of Nature said, " We understand one 
another ; and so thou art mine, and I am thine." 
And then everything in Nature feels dear. 

William Mountpoed. 

So every spirit, as it is most pure. 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and is more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight : 
For of the soul the body form doth take ; 
For soul is form, and doth the body make. 

Spensee. 

15 July. All inmost things, we may say, are 
melodious ; naturally utter themselves in song. 
The meaning of song goes deep. Poetry, there- 
fore, we will call musical thought. See deep 
enough, and you see musically ; the heart of Na- 
ture being everywhere music, if you can only 

reach it. Thomas Caelylb. 

For the world was built in order. 
And the atoms march in time. 

R. W. ITmerson. 

16 July. Gladness can scarcely be a solitary 
thing : the very life of praise seems choral ; it is 
more than one bounded heart can utter. Surely 
when one has once entered into the blissful se- 
crets of harmony, the note seems to suggest the 
chord, to ask to be built up within it. 

DOEA Geekn'well. 

O the one life within us and abroad, 

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul I 



122 BECKONINGS. 

A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, 
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere. 
Methinks it should have been impossible 
Not to love all things in a world so filled ; 
"Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air 
Is music slumbering on her instrument. 

S. T. COLEEroGE. 

17 July. I have long loved art and poetry, 
because I saw that they had a power to raise and 
soften humanity ; more lately I have seen that 
they are good in themselves — or whence, but 
from their native affinity with things that are 
more excellent, should come this acknowledged 
power ? Why, when the heart would reveal its 
truest, deepest instincts, does it seek to express 
itself in music ? Why, when the mind would 
utter forth words of nobleness — when it would 
be truer and sweeter than under its ordinary con- 
ditions — does it speak in poetry ? Could there 
be a prose psalm ? Doea Greenwell. 

God Himself does not speak prose, but commu- 
nicates with us by hints, omens, inferences, and 
dark resemblances in objects lying all around us. 

R. W. Emeeson. 

There is no truth cognizable by man which 
may not shape itself into poetry. J. c. Shaiep. 

18 July. 

" Poets are all who love, who feel great truths 
And tell them ; and the truth of truths is love," 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 123 

'T is pleasant, when blue skies are o'er us bending, 

Within old starry-gated Poesy, 

To meet a soul set to no worldly tune, 

Like thine, sweet Friend ! Oh, dearer this to me 

Than are the dewy trees, the sun, the moon. 

Or noble music with a golden ending. 

Alexander Smith. 

19 July. Wherever there is a sky above him, 
and a world around him, the poet is in his place ; 
for here too is man's existence, with its infinite 
longings and small acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, 
ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspira- 
tions, its fears and hopes, that wander through 
eternity ; and all the mystery of brightness and 
of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or 
climate, since man first began to live. The poet 
must have an eye to see these things, and a heart 
to understand them. Carlyle. 

Poets, in seeking the beautiful, find more truths 
than philosophers in seeking the true. Joubert. 

20 July. The true end of poetry is to awa- 
ken men to the divine side of things, to bear wit- 
ness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, 
the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human 
souls ; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, 
for noble but oppressed persons, for down-trodden 
causes; and to make men feel that through all 
outward beauty and all pure inward affection, 
God is addressing them. j. c. Shairp. 



124 BECKONINGS. 

For I believed the poets : it is they 
Who utter wisdom from the central deep, 
And, listening to the inward flow of things, 
Speak to the age out of eternity. 

J. R. Lowell. 

21 July. No poet ever yet has made, or 
ever can make, the most of human life, even poet- 
ically, who has not regarded it as standing on the 
threshold of an invisible world, as supported by 
divine foundations. - J. c. Shaiep. 

In all true works of Art wilt thou discern 
Eternity looking through Time ; the God-like ren- 
dered visible. Caelylb. 

22 July. Science and Poetry recognizing, as 
they do, the order and the beauty of the miiverse, 
are alike handmaids of devotion. They have 
been, they may be, drawn away from her altar. 
But in their natural character they are cooper- 
ators, and, like twin sisters, they walk hand in 
hand. Science tracks the footprints of the great 
creating Power ; Poetry unveils the smile of the 
all-sustaining Love. Science adores as a sub- 
ject ; Poetry worships as a child. Heney wabe, Je. 

Even those who can in no sense be called ex- 
clusively religious poets, if they grasp life with a 
strong hand, are constrained to take in the sense 
of something beyond this life. J. c. Shaiep. 

23 July. A true poet, a man in whose heart 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 125 

resides some effluence of wisdom, some tone of 
the eternal melodies, is the most precious gift 
that can be bestowed upon a generation ; we see 
in him a freer, purer development of whatever is 
noblest in ourselves. Cablylb. 

Better to have the poet's heart than brain, — 
. Feeling than song ; but better far than both, 
To be a song, a music of God's making. 

George MacDonald. 

24 July. Poetry was all written before time 
was, and whenever we are so finely organized 
that we can penetrate into that region where the 
air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and 
attempt to write them down. R. w. Emerson. 

Of every noble work the silent part is best : 

Of all expressions, that which cannot be expressed. 

W. W. Story. 

25 July. Beautiful it is to understand and 
know that a thought did never yet die ; that 
as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered 
it and created it from the whole Past, so thou 
wilt transmit it to the whole Future. It is thus 
that the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the first 
times, still feels and sees in us of the latest ; that 
the wise man stands ever encompassed and spir- 
itually embraced by a cloud of witnesses and 
brothers, and there is a living, literal communion 
of saints, wide as the world itself, and as the his- 
tory of the world. Carlyle. 



126 BECKONINGS. 

Neither do I utter anything right unto men 
which Thou hast not before heard from me ; nor 
dost Thou hear any such thing from me. which 
Thou hast not first said unto me. St. Augustinb. 

26 July. 

How sure it is, 

That if we say a true word, instantly 

We feel 't is God's, not ours, and pass it on 

As bread at sacrament. mes. e. B. BEow^^^-G. 

Poetry is but another form of wisdom, of re- 
ligion ; is itself wisdom and rehgion. Cahlyia 

He who would write heroic poems must make 
his whole life a heroic poem. John Mhitok. 

27 July. 

It may be glorious to write 

Thoughts that shall glad the two or three 
High souls, like those far stars that come to sight 

Once in a century : 
But better far it is to speak 

One simple word which now and then 
Shall waken their free nature in the weak 

And friendless sons of men ; 
To write some earnest verse or line, 

Which, seeking not the praise of art, 
Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine 

In the untutored heart. Ja^ies Russell Low-kll. 

28 July. -r , , ^ . 

I only ask to smg 

A little song, so true and strangely sweet, 



FREEDOM, BEAUTY, AND POETRY. 127 

That, though it be not wise or even complete. 
The tired world, while going to and fro. 
More glad and faithful, hearing it, shall grow. 

L. B. BiCKFOED. 

" Sing to my soul the sweet song that thou livest ! 

Read me the poem that never was penned, — 
The wonderful idyl of life that thou givest 

Fresh from thy spirit, oh beautiful friend 1 " 

29 July. The mighty spirits of our race are 
as the lyric thoughts of God that drop and 
breathe from His Almighty solitude, — transient 
chords flying forth from the strings, as His sol- 
emn hand wanders over the possibilities of beauty. 
One only finished expression of His mind, one 
entire symmetric strain, has fallen upon our 
world. In Christ we have the overflowing Word, 
the deep and beautiful soliloquy of the Most 
High : not His message and His argument, — for 
in that there were no religion, — but the very po- 
etry of God, which could not have been told us 
face to face, but only cast in meditation upon the 
silence of history. Were He the only-born — the 
solitary self -revelation — of the Creative Spirit, 
He could not more purely open the mind of 
Heaven, being the very Logos — the apprehensi- 
ble nature of God — which, long unuttered to the 
world, and abiding in the beginning with Him, 
has now come forth and dwelt among us, full of 
grace and truth. James Martineau. 

30 July. The life of Christ is the noblest 



128 BECKONINGS. 

poetry ; the actions and words of Christ are po- 
etry. With that the mind intensely elevated labors, 
^thout power of expressing it in words adequate, 
and therefore must find for itself figures ; just as 
God is obliged to speak to us by the symbols of 
this universe, and just as the universe tells us of 
the beauty of God ; but try to express in words 
the beauty, majesty, and love, and it will all 
fail. 

So in the words of Christ there is a something 
forever beautiful, but it is a beauty too refined 
for the mind to grasp ; therefore these acts of 
Christ remain forever full of a meaning which 
can never be exhausted. These words it is our 
privilege to find, each time we look into them, as 
fresh and new as if they had never been inter- 
preted before. F. W. Robertson. 

31 July. You never get to the end of Christ's 
words. There is something in them always be- 
hind. They pass into proverbs, they pass into 
laws, they pass into doctrines, they pass into con- 
solations ; but they never pass away ; and, after 
all the use that is made of them, they are still 
not exhausted. Dean Stanley. 

Sweeter than any sound by angels heard 

Whispered or sung among their deathless 
flowers, 
Christ is the Beautiful, Etern?.! Word 

Breathed from God's heart into this world of 
ours. 



EIGHTH MONTH. 



Departing summer is eloquent with invitations 
and beckonings. There is a trail of elusive foot- 
steps on the hills, white, gauzy garments of un- 
seen messengers fading away into cloud-threads 
and tissues of mist. Mountains with bluer moun- 
tains behind them, summits overtopped by higher 
summits, pearly with distance, allure the pilgrim- 
eye towards the unimagined, the infinite. He 
has never received the fullest beauty of the at- 
tained, who has not seen the lower heights blent 
in aerial fusion with loftier peaks, — who has not 
felt himself, at his highest, refreshed and inspired 
by cool breezes from the unattained — yea, the 
unattainable beyond. Every step upward is tonic, 
though the divine impossibilities of the heavens 
overhang us. For the heavens themselves beckon 
us onward, not away, from earthly things, but 
through them into spiritual realities. 

So the pilgrim may rest under the flowering 
vines of the roadside — the traveler's joy, climb- 
ing as he climbs — and may read in their white 
blossoms a promise of the fairer flowers of im- 
mortality ; may know, by daily deepening reve- 
lations of beauty and truth on his upward path, 



130 BECKOXrXGS. 

tkat he has not been mocked by the whisper 

which has floated through his spirit like a breeze 
from invisible horizons. — 

'' Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty ; 
they shall behold the land that is Tery far off." 



AUGUST. 

TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 

1 August. The feeding of the rivers and 
the purifying of the winds are the least of the 
services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst 
of the human heart for the beauty of God's 
working — to startle its lethargy with the deep 
and pure agitation of astonishment — are their 
higher missions. It is impossible to examine 
in their connected system the features of even 
the most ordinary mountain-scenery, without con- 
cluding that it has been prepared in order to 
unite as far as possible, and in the closest com- 
pass, every means of delighting and sanctifying 
ji the heart of man. Jom? Eusds. 

I These old. eternal hills of Thine. 

What mighty cheer they breathe ! 
'What fullness of delight divine 
i Thy solemn stars bequeath ! 

.p "When cheer and strength my soul doth lack, 

j Thy glorv' makes me ^hoie : 

1 Amidst Thy summer I win back 

? The summer of mv soul. i. h. Gill. 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 131 

2 August. 

But thou shalt wander like a breeze 
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds 
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores. 
And mountain-crags : so shalt thou see and hear 
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 
Of that eternal language, which thy God 
Utters, who from eternity doth teach 
Himself in all, and all things in Himself. 
Great universal Teacher ! He shall mould 
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

S. T. COLERIDQB. 

3 August. The earth is beautiful, I said to 
myself ; the earth is good. 

Then I raised my glance up the mountain-side, 
higher than the beeches, higher than the pines, 
higher than the chalets, than the pastures, up, up, 
to the snow — up to that sparkling cupola, whose 
outline sharply cuts the deep blue sky, — up to 
that region of Paradise ! 

Oh, ye heavens, ye are great and glorious ! My 
God, Thou art the mighty One, the Eternal ! 

Love ! — It is only that which I have been 
forgetting all this time ! — the love of God, the 
love which has come down to us, the love which 
defies time and space, the immortal, imperishable 
love Thou hast put into the heart of man ! 

Madame de Gasparin. 

4 August. 

The mountain-wind ! most spiritual thing of all 
The wide earth knows ! When in the sultry 
time 



132 BECKONINGS. 

He stoops him from his vast cerulean hall, 

He seems the breath of a celestial clime, — 
As if from heaven's wide-open gates did flow 
Health and refreshment on the world below. 

W. C. Bryant. 
Transfused through you, mountain friends, 
With mine your solemn spirit blends, 
And life no more hath sepacrate ends. 

I read each misty mountain-sign, 
I know the voice of wave and pine, 
And I am yours and ye are mine. 

Rocked on her breast, these pines and I 

Alike on Nature's love rely. 

And equal seems to live or die. j. g. Whittieb. 

6 August. Arrived aloft, he finds himself 
lifted into the evening sunset light. The moun- 
tain-ranges are beneath, and folded together : 
only the loftier summits look down here and 
there as on a second plain ; lakes also lie clear 
and earnest in the solitude. No trace of man 
now visible. But sunwards, lo you ! how it tow- 
ers sheer up, a world of mountains, the diadem 
and centre of the mountain-region ! A hundred 
and a hundred savage peaks, in the last light of 
day ; all glowing, of gold and amethyst, like giant 
spirits of the wilderness. Thomas Caelyle. 

Oh, to keep it ! oh, to hold it, 
While the tremulous rays enfold it. 
Oh, to drink in all the beauty, and never thirst 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 133 

Yet less lovely if less fleeting ! 
For the mingling and the meeting 
Of the wonder and the rapture can but overflow 
in pain. f. r. Havergal. 

6 August. 

How beautiful this dome of sky, 
And the vast hills, in fluctuation fixed 
At Thy command — how awful ! Shall the soul, 
Human and rational, report of Thee 
Even less than these ? Be mute who will, who 

can ; 
Yet will I praise Thee with impassioned voice ; 
My lips, that may forget Thee in the crowd. 
Cannot forget Thee here, where Thou hast built 

For Thy own glory in the wilderness ! 

Wordsworth. 

7 August. As soon as the sun is set, the 
massive Jura stands out with outline admirably 
pure. The sky behind it then assumes that trans- 
parent, almost green tinge that one sees in Peru- 
gino's paintings. I do not know why that partic- 
ular sky, that ethereal hue, that light without 
rays, that brightness almost polar in its severity, 
should attract my gaze, as if it were just there 
that we might look for the opening of Paradise. 

When my thoughts travel along unbroken hori- 
zons, they get fainter and fainter, they melt 
away like mists before the breeze. When they 
meet that immutable fortress with its battlements 
of pine, — those slopes furrowed by steep paths, 
— those openings in the forest, — the perfect out- 



134 BECKONINGS. 



m 



line of that far summit, — then my mind wakes, 
my life seems doubled. I do not say that the 
ideas raised are always very definite ; it is rather 
a healthy gust of energy and liberty that flows 
down thence, and fills my heart. 

Madame de Gaspasin. 

8 August. 

Yes, glory out of glory breaks ; 

More than the gift itself is given : 
Each gift a glorious promise makes ; 

Thine Earth doth prophesy of Heaven. 
These mighty hills we joy to climb, 

These happy streams we wander by, 
Reveal the Eternal Hills sublime, — 

Of God's own River prophesy. 
These odors blest, these gracious flowers. 

These sweet sounds that around us rise, 
Give tidings of the heavenly bowers. 

Prelude the angelic harmonies. 
O mercies kindly incomplete ! 

Dear joys our hearts that may not fill! 
Strange grace ! that in Thy gifts most sweet 

We read of gifts diviner still. T. H. Gill. 

9 August. We take our ideas of fearfulness 
and sublimity alternately from the mountains and 
the sea; but we associate them unjustly. The 
sea-wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devour- 
ing and terrible ; but the silent wave of the blue 
mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness 
of perpetual mercy : and the one surge, unfath- 
omable in its darkness, the other, unshaken in its 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 135 

faithfulness, forever bear the seal of their ap- 
pointed symbol : 

*' Thy righteousness is like the great mountains : 
Thj judgments are a great deep." 

John Ruskin. 

10 August. 

There is sultry gloom on the mountain-brow, 

And a sultry glow beneath. 
Oh, for a breeze from the western sea. 
Soft and reviving, sweet and free. 
Over the shadowless hill and lea, 

Over the barren heath ! 
There are clouds and darkness around God's 
ways, 

And the noon of life grows hot : 
And, though His faithfulness standeth fast 
As the mighty mountains, a shroud is cast 
Over its glory, solemn and vast. 

Veiling, but changing it not. 
Send a sweet breeze from Thy sea, Lord, 

From Thy deep, deep sea of love ! 
Though it lift not the veil from the cloudy 

height, 
Let the brow grow cool, and the footsteps light, 
As it comes with holy and soothing might, 

Like the wing of a snowy dove ! 

F. R. Havergal. 

11 August. The mountain-tops have the stars 
for their nearest neighbors, the only friends to 
whom they can look up with firm assurance of 
their faithfulness : — the most steadfast forms of 
earth, living forever alone in separated nearness to 
the most steadfast presences of heaven ! 



136 BECKONINGS. 

On the mountain-top, a man can but ask him- 
self what there is within him that corresponds to 
this lofty strength and star-ward aspiration : for 
he, too, is of the earth, yet a near neighbor to 
the heavens. 

Tell me the song of the beautiful stars, 

As grandly they ghde on their blue way above 
us. 
Looking, despite of our spirits' sin-scars, 

Down on us tenderly, yearning to love us ! 
This is the song in their work-worship sung, — 
Down through the world- jeweled universe rung : 
'^ Onward forever ! for evermore onward ! " 
And ever they open their loving eyes sunward. 

Gerald Massey. 

12 August. 

"A man's best things are nearest him, 

Lie close about his feet ; — 
It is the distant and the dim 

That we are sick to greet : 
For flowers that grow our hands beneath, 

We struggle and aspire ; 
Our hearts must die except we breathe 

The air of fresh desire. 
But, brothers, who up reason's hill 

Advance with hopeful cheer, 
Oh, loiter not ! those heights are chill, — 

As chill as they are clear. 
And still restrain your haughty gaze. 

The loftier that ye go. 
Remembering distance leaves a haze 

On all that lies below." 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 137 

13 August. Men seek retreats for them- 
selves, — houses in the country, sea-shores, and 
mountains ; and thou, too, art wont to desire 
such things very much. But this is altogether a 
mark of the commonest of men ; for it is in thy 
power whenever thou shalt choose, to retire into 
thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or 
more freedom, does a man retire than into his 
own soul, particularly when he has within him 
such thoughts, that by looking into them he is 
immediately in perfect tranquillity, — which is 
nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. 

Makcus Aukelius. 

At summer eve, when heaven's aerial bow 
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below, 
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye, 
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky ? 
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear 
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near ? — 
'T is distance lends enchantment to the view, 
And robes the mountain in its azure hue ! 

Thomas Campbell. 

14 August. New scenery is of no use to us 
unless our natures are clear enough to reflect it, 
as I have seen mountains doubled on quiet lakes. 

Edward Garrett. 

We are what suns, and winds, and waters make 

us, 
The mountains are our sponsors, and the riUs 
Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles. 

Landor. 

15 August. If in our souls there were no 



138 BECKONINGS. 

feeling of infinity, mountains would not be sub- 
lime to us; they would only be craggy steeps, 
and no more to us than to the goat and the 
chamois. Mountpord. 

These gray crags 



Not on crags are hung, 
But beads are of a rosary 
On prayer and music strung. 

R. W. Emeeson. 

16 August. How welcome would it often be 
to many a child of anxiety and toil, to be sud- 
denly transferred from the heat and din of the 
city, the restlessness and worry of the mart, to 
the midnight garden or the mountain-top ! And 
like refreshment does a high faith, with its infi- 
nite prospects ever open to the heart, afford to 
the worn and weary. No laborious travels are 
needed for the devout mind, for it carries within 
it Alpine heights and starlit skies, which it may 
reach with a moment's thought, and feel at once 
the loneliness of nature and the magnificence of 

God. James Martineau. 

17 August. We are too apt to look abroad 
for good. But the only true good is within. In 
this outward universe, magnificent as it is, in 
the bright day and the starry night, in the earth 
and the skies, we can discover nothing so vast as 
thought, so strong as the unconquerable purpose 
of duty, so sublime as the spirit of disinterested- 
ness and self-sacrifice. w. e. Channing. 



I 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 139 

He that by seeking hath himself once found, 
Hath ever found a happy fortune. 

George Herbert. 

18 August. And though sometimes, on pass- 
ing from the turmoil of the city and the heats 
of restless life into the silent temple of the uni- 
verse, we are tempted to think that there is the 
taint of earth, and here the purity of heaven ; 
yet sure it is that God is seen by us through man, 
rather than through nature : and that without the 
eye of our brothers, and the voices of our kind, 
the winds might sigh, and the stars look down on 

us in vain. James Martineau. 

O all wide places, far from feverous towns ! 
Great shining seas ! pine forests ! mountains 
wild ! 
Rock-bosomed shores ! rough heaths, and sheep- 
cropt downs ! 
Vast pallid clouds ! blue spaces undefiled ! 
Room ! give me room ! give loneliness and air ! 
Free things and plenteous in your regions fair ! 
O God of mountains, stars, and boundless spaces ! 

O God of freedom and of joyous hearts ! 
When Thy face looketh forth from all men's 
faces, 
There will be room enough in crowded marts : 
Brood Thou around me, and the noise is o'er, 
Thy universe my closet with shut door. 

George MacDonald. 

19 August. The mountains make in us a 
feeling sublimer than of what they are them- 



140 BECKONINGS. 

selves. But they are what they are to us, be- 
cause there is that in our nature through which 
height beyond height might rise before us in the 
universe, and so our souls grow grander and 
more solemn ; but only to feel more grandly and 
more solemnly at further higher sights, forever. 

MOUNTFORD. 

Be thy duty high as angel's flight, 

Fulfill it, and a higher will arise 
Even from its ashes. Duty is infinite, 

Receding as the skies. 
Were it not wisdom, then, to close our eyes 

On duties crowding only to appall ? 
No : Duty is our ladder to the skies ; 

And, climbing not, we fall. 

Robert Leighton. 

20 August. The heroes of mankind are the 
mountains, the highlands of the moral world. 
They diversify its monotony, they furnish the 
watershed of its history, as the Grampians, or the 
Alps, or the Andes, which tower over the low- 
lands and fertilize the plains and divide the 
basins of the world of nature. They are the 
'* full-welling fountain-heads of change," as well 
as the serene heights of repose. Dean Stanley. 

O great, befriending natures, 

Whom God hath set about 
Our human habitations, — 

How blank were life, without 
Your presences inspiring. 

Your silent, upward call ! 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 141 

Above us, and yet of us, 
One heaven enfolds us all !. 

21 August. This, it seems to me, is the true 
use of the Heroic, of a life transcending life's 
ordinary possibilities ; such a life is a direct call 
upon the soul, saying, "Friend, come up high- 
er ! " And the heart recognizes its voice, exults 
in it, claims it as the voice of kindred risen to a 
more exalted sphere. It is like air from a moun- 
tain summit where we could not live, and yet it 
seems our native air, and braces us in every 
nerve. Dora Greenwell. 

Life hath its Tabor heights. 
Its lofty mounts of heavenly recognition. 
Whose unveiled glories flash to earth munition 
Of love, and truth, and clearer intuition : 

Hail ! mount of all delights ! i. c. Gilbert. 

22 August. As a mountain seems to be the 
meeting-place of earth and heaven, the place 
where the bending skies meet the aspiring plan- 
et, the place where the sunshine and the cloud 
keep closest company with the granite and the 
grass, — so Christ is the meeting-place of divin- 
ity and humanity. He is at once the condescen- 
sion of divinity and the exaltation of humanity ; 
and man wanting to know God's idea of him, 
must go up into Christ, and he will find it there. 

Phillips Brooks. 

There are points from which we can command 
our life, — 



142 BECKONINGS. 

When the soul sweeps the future like a glass, 

And coming, things, full-freighted with our fate, 

Jut out dark on the offing of the mind. 

p. J. Bailey. 

23 August. 

'T is, by comparison, an easy task 

Earth to despise ; but to converse with Heaven, — 

This is not easy. To relinquish all 

We have, or hope, of happiness or joy, 

And stand in freedom loosened from the world, 

I deem not arduous ; but must needs confess 

That 't is a thing impossible, to frame 

Conceptions equal to the souFs desires ; 

And the most difficult of tasks to keep 

Heights which the soul is competent to gain. 

WOEDSWORTH. 

24 August. The Moss could not climb to 
the summit of the mountain, but it crept as high 
as it could, and then, pausing to rest, made of 
itself a softer path for tired feet to climb by, and 
a fresher slope for the descent of the mountain- 
rills. And the weary traveler afterward remem- 
bered the Moss of the shady cleft where he had 
rested, as a part of the mountain itself : and the 
people of the valleys looked up and were glad of 
the greenness that marked the birthplace of hid- 
den perennial springs. 

25 August. It is out from the depth of our 
humility that the height of our destiny looks 
grandest. For let me truly feel that in myself 
I am nothing, and at once, through every inlet 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 143 

of my soul, God comes in and is everything in 

me. MOUNTPORD. 

No valley-life but hath some mountain-days, — 
Bright summits in the retrospective view, 
And toil-won passes to glad prospects new, — 

Fair sunlit memories of joy and praise. 

F. R. Havergal. 

26 August. God makes the glow-worm as 
well as the star : the light in both is divine. If 
mine be an earth-star to gladden the wayside, I 
must cultivate humbly and rejoicingly its green 
earth-glow, and not seek to blanch it to the white- 
ness of the stars that He in the fields of blue. 
For to deny God in my own being is to cease to 
behold Him in any. God and man can only 
meet by the man's becoming that which God 
meant him to be. George MacDonald. 

I know not where to turn, each step is new ; 
No wish before me flies to point the way, 
But on I travel with no end in view, 

Save that from Him who leads I may not stray : 
He knows it all ; the turning of the road, 

Where this way leads, and that, — He knows 
it well, 
And finds for me at night a safe abode, 

Though I all houseless know not where to 
dwell. — 
And canst thou tell, then, where my journeying 

lies? 
If so, thou treadest with me the same blue skies. 

Jones Very. 



144 BECKONmGS. 

27 August. It is true that genius takes its 
rise out of the mountains of rectitude ; that all 
beauty and power which men covet are somehow 
born out of that Alpine district. R. w. Emerson. 

bright Ideals ! how ye shine 
Aloft in realms of air ! 

Ye pour your streams of light divine 

Above our low despair. 
Shine on, shine on, through earth's dark night, 

Nor let your glories pale ! 
Some stronger soul may win the height 

Where weaker ones must fail. 
Upon your awful heights of blue 

Shine on, forever shine ! 

1 come ! I '11 climb, I '11 fly to you ; 

For endless years are mine. E. H. Sears. 

28 August. If I cannot reaHze my Ideal, 
I can at least idealize my Real. If I am but a 
raindrop in a shower, I will at least be a perfect 
drop ; if but a leaf in a whole June, I will at 
least be a perfect leaf. w. c. Gannbtt. 

Love Virtue. She alone is free. 
She can teach ye how to climb 
Higher than the sphery clime : 
Or, if Virtue feeble were. 
Heaven itself would stoop to her. 



Milton. 



29 August. 



Not failure, but low aim, is crime. 

James Russell Lowell. 



TOWARD THE HEIGHTS. 145 

The only failure a man ought to fear is fail- 
ure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be 
best. George Eliot. 

They only the victory win, 
Who have fought the good fight and have van- 
quished the demon that tempts us within ; 
Who have held to their faith unseduced by the 

prize that the world holds on high ; 
Who have dared for a high cause to suffer, resist, 
fight, if need be, to die 1 w. w. Story. 

30 August. 

Fail, yet rejoice ; because no less 
The failure that makes thy distress 
May teach another full success. 

It may be that in some great need 
Thy life's poor fragments are decreed 
To help build up a lofty deed. 

Thy heart should throb in vast content, 
Thus knowing that it was but meant 
As chord in one great instrument ; 

That even the discord in thy soul 
May make completer music roll 
From out the great harmonious whole. 

Adelaide A. Proctbb. 

Even our failures are a prophecy, — 

Even our yearnings and our bitter tears 

After that fair and good we could not grasp. 

George Eliot. 



146 BECKONINGS. 

31 August. 

I know 
How far high failure overleaps the bounds 
Of low successes. — Not from arrogant pride, 
Nor over-boldness fail they, who have striven 
To tell what they have heard, with voice too weak 
For such high message. More it is than ease, 
Palace and pomp, honors and luxuries. 
To have seen white Presences upon the hills ; 
To have heard the voices of the Eternal Gods. 

Edwin Morris. 

And thou shalt walk in soft white light, with 

kings and priests abroad ; 
And thou shalt summer high in bliss, upon the 

hills of God. Thomas Aird. 



AUTUMN. 



A WOMAN, moving up the orchard-slope 
With even gait, and steady, seeking eyes. 

Autumn, that ripens all things, ripens hope ; 
Trees bear fruit every month, in Paradise. 

September, standing on her golden round 
Of the year's ladder, mid her vintage-leaves, 

Hears through her harvest-fields a wail resound ; — 
Her starving sisters begging for her sheaves. 

Autumn did but enrich herself to give ; 

And, scattering blessings, see her now depart, 
Whispering that on life's hills 't was sweet to live. 

While Indian Summer sunshine warmed her heart I 



NINTH MONTH. 



Marts' kinds of fruit grow upon the tree of 
life, but none so sweet as friendship. It ripens at 
all seasons ; and, as with the orange-tree, its blos- 
soms and fruit appear at the same time, full of 
refreshment for sense and for soul. 

As we welcome the early apple and the peach, 
that come to us with the aroma of summer yet 
fresh within them and warm upon them, so gladly 
we reach out our hand for the friendship that 
enriches the autumn of our life, looking upon it, 
albeit, only as the promise of more enduring 
fruit which wiU solace and strengthen us in the 
winter of age. 

But who shall speak of friendship as ripening 
for earth alone ? If we are not to feed eternally 
upon this manna, our own immortality can have 
little meaning to us. No : when spirits have once 
found their true blending in the life divine, each 
shall be able to say of the other forever, '• I sat 
down under his shadow with great delight, and 
his fruit was sweet to my taste. *' 



HEART UNTO HEART. 149 

SEPTEMBER. 
HEART UNTO HEART. 

1 September. In the progress of each man's 
character, his relations to the best men, which at 
first seem only the romances of youth, acquire a 
graver importance ; and he will have learned the 
lesson of life who is skillful in the ethics of friend- 
ship. R. W. Emerson. 

Beyond all wealth, honor, or even health, is 
the attachment we form to noble souls ; because 
to become one with the good, generous, and true, 
is to become in a measure good, generous, and 

true ourselves. Db. Arnold. 

2 September. The supreme happiness of 
life is the conviction that we are loved, — loved 
for ourselves, — say, rather, loved in spite of our- 
selves. Victor Hugo. 

From irrepressible thoughts foreboding ill, 
I turn to thee as to a heaven apart : — 
Oh ! not apart, not distant, near me ever, 
So near my soul that nothing can thee sever ! 
How shall I fear, knowing there is for me 
A city of refuge, builded pleasantly 
Within the silent places of the heart ? 

Arthur Henry Hallam. 

3 Septem.ber. Blessed is the man who has 
the gift of making friends ; for it is one of God's 



150 BECKONINGS. 

best gifts. It involves many things ; but above 
all, the power of going out of one's self, and see- 
ing and appreciating whatever is noble and living 
in another man. Thomas Hughbs. 

Friendship, a dear balm, — 
Whose coming is as light and music are 
Mid dissonance and gloom : — a star 
Which moves not mid the moving heavens alone ; 
A smile among dark frowns ; a gentle tone 
Among rude voices ; a beloved light ; 
A solitude, a refuge, a delight. Shelley. 

4 September. We can never replace a 
friend. When a man is fortunate enough to have 
several, he finds that they are all different : no 
one has a double in friendship. 

Frederick von Schilleb. 

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours 
For one lone soul another lonely soul, 

Each chasm g each through all the weary hours, 
And meeting strangely at one sudden goal : 

Then blend they, like green leaves with golden 
flowers. 
Into one beautiful and perfect whole ; 

And life's long night is ended, and the way 

Lies open onward to eternal day. 

Edwin Arnold. 

6 September. By Friendship, I suppose you 
mean the greatest love, and the greatest useful- 
ness, and the most open communications, and the 
noblest sufferings, and the most exemplary faith- 



^ 



HEART UNTO HEART. 151 

fulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest 
counsel, and the greatest union of minds, of which 
brave men and vromen are capable. 

Jeremy Taylor. 

O friend, my bosom said. 
Through thee alone the sky is arched. 

Through thee the rose is red. 
All things through thee take nobler form, 

And look beyond the earth ; 
The mill-round of our fate appears 

A sun-path in thy worth. 
Me, too, thy nobleness has taught 

To master my despair : 
The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship fair. 

R. W. Emerson. 

6 September. Blessed influence of one true, 
loving soul on another ! Not calculable by alge- 
bra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effec- 
tual, mighty as the hidden process by which the 
tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall 
stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower. 
Ideas are often poor ghosts ; our sun-filled eyes 
cannot discern them ; they pass athwart us in 
thin vapor, and cannot make themselves felt. 
But sometimes they are made flesh ; they breathe 
upon us with warm breath ; they touch us with 
soft, responsive hands ; they look upon us with 
sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing 
tones ; they are clothed in a living, human soul, 
with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then 
their presence is a power, then they shake us like 



152 BECKOXCsGS. 

a passion, and we are drawn after them with 
gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame. 

7 September. 

True love in this differs from gold and day, 

That to divide is not to take away. — 

If you divide suffering and dross, you may 

Diminish till it is consumed away ; 

If you divide pleasure, and love, and thought, 

Each part exceeds the whole ; and we know not 

How much, while any yet remains unshared, 

Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared. 

Shellet. 

The love for one. from which there doth not 

spring 
Wide love for all. is but a worthless thing. 

jASCe RrSFfCTT. LoWBLZk 

8 September. So long as thou hast a whole 
and undivided love towards all men, a share of 
the virtues and divine influences bestowed upon 
all flows out unto thee through this love. But if 
thou dost sever any one from this spirit of uni- 
versal love, thou wilt not receive the precious 
benefits of the outflowings of love. *»m Iaoib. 

Pure and true affection, weU I know, 

Leaves in the heart no room for seLflshness- 
When we love perfectly, for its own sake 
We love, and not our own ; being ready thus, 
TVhatever sacrifice is asked, to make ; — 
That which is best for it, is best for us- 



HEART UNTO HEART. 153 

9 September. The highest compact we can 
make with our fellow is, " Let there be truth 
between us two for evermore.'' 

Between simple and noble persons there is al- 
ways a quick intelligence ; they recognize at 
sight, and meet on a better ground than the tal- 
ents and skills they may chance to possess, — 
namely on sincerity and uprightness. For it is 
not what talents or genius a man has, but how 
he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship 
and character. The man that stands by himself, 
the universe stands by him also. R. w. emekson. 

Only he who lives a life of his own can help 

the lives of other men. Phillips Bkooks. 

10 September. It is folly to believe that 
one can faithfully love, who does not love faith- 
fulness. Sm Philip Sidney. 

Beloved, who love beauty and fair truth. 

Come nearer me I too near ye cannot come : 

Make me an atmosphere sweet with your youth ! 
Give me your souls to breathe in, a large room ! 

Speak not a word, for see, my spirit lies 

Helpless and dumb ; shine on me with your 
eyes ! George MacDonald. 

11 September. Let him be to me a spirit. 
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too 
spiritual, as if we could lose any genuine love. 

I will owe to my friends this evanescent inter- 



154 BECKOMNGS. 

course. I will receive from them, not what they 
have, but what they are. They shall give me 
that which properly they cannot give, but which 
emanates from them. But they shall not hold 

me by any relations less subtle and pure. 

R. W. EMEasoN. 

If thou hast something, bring thy goods ! 

A fair return be thine 1 
If thou art something, bring thy soul 

And interchange with mine ! 

FSEDERICK VON SCHILLEB. 

12 September. Every emotion which a man 
can feel, every experience which a man can un- 
dergo, has its little form and its great form. 
Love is either a whim of the eyes, or a devotion 

and consecration of the soul. Phillips Beooks. 

Far have I clambered in my mind, 

But nought so great as Love I find. 

Higher than heaven ! lower than hell ! 

What is thy tent ? Where mayest thou dwell ? 

My mansion hight Humility ; 

Heaven's vastest capability. 

The further it doth downward bend, 

The higher up it doth ascend ; 

If it go down to utmost nought, 

It shall return with what it sought. 

HEjfBY Moke. 

13 September. I believe philosophers have 
not noticed one thing, — the absorbent character 
of the soul. Marvelous is its power of recep- 
tivity. It is a wonderfully impressionable sub- 



HEART UNTO HEART. 155 

stance. An hour in the company of saints is 
enough. The whole heart is revolutionized. All 
scriptures bear testimony to this blessed influ- 
ence. Keshub Chunder Sen. 

Oh ! if we owe warm thanks to Heaven, 't is when 
In the slow progress of the struggling years 
Our touch is blest to feel the pulse of men 
Who walk in light and love above their peers 
White -robed, and forward point with guiding 

hand, 
Breathing a heaven around them where they 

stand* John Stuart Blackie. 

14 September. We do know that we may 
receive purification from one another, that the 
tenderness, and love, and patience of one man 
act in a marvelous way upon another, when 
those qualities seem the furthest from him, when 
he most confesses that they do not belong to him. 
We do not set ourselves deliberately to follow 
examples. The examples get the mastery over 
us ; there is a life in the men who exhibit them 
which awakens life in us. f. d. Maurice. 

I know the face of him who with the sphere 

Of unseen presences communion keeps : 
His eyes retain its wonders in their clear 

Unfathomable deeps. 
He brings the thought that gives to earthly things 

Eternal meaning ; brings the living faith 

That, even now, puts on the immortal wings, 

And clears the shadow, Death. 



156 BECKOXINGS. 

Tliis in his face I see : and, when we meet, 
My earthliness is shamed by him ; but yet 
Takes hope, to think that in the miholy street, 
Such men are to be met. Robekt Lekstooi. 

15 September. The unity of spirits is partly 
in their sympathy, and partly in their giving and 

taking, and always in their love : and these are 
their delight and their sti^ength : for their strength 
is in their co-working and army fellowship, and 
their delight is in the giving and receiving of 
alternate and perpetual ctiirents of good. 

JOEDf BOSKDL 

O friendship, equal-poised control, 
O heart, with kiudhest motion warm, 

sacred essence ! other form, 
solemn ghost ! crowned soul ! 

Whatever way my days decline. 

1 felt and feel, though left alone, 
His being working in mine own. 

The footsteps of his life in mine. 

ALiFbied Tesitibos. 

16 September. I do not wish to treat friend- 
ships daintily, but with roughest courage. When 
they are real, they are not glass threads of frost- 
work, but the solidest things we know. 

The sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I 
draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is 
the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought 
is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house 
that shelters a friend ! R. w. 



HEART UNTO HEART. 157 

Trust me ! but trust me not as aught divine ! 

Trust me with eyes wide open to all ill : 

Giving thy faith, but keeping fast thy will, 
Lest in one evil scheme we both combine. 

Trust me as honest, knowing I am weak ; 
Stronger, but yet as much in need of aid : 
Losing no step through faith, and not afraid 

To say, " We shall not find there what we 
seek." 
Lean on me, love ! but not so utterly 
That if I stumble, thou shouldst helpless be ! 

C. MONKHOUSE. 

17 September. It has been truly said, that 
in those who love little, love is a primary affec- 
tion ; a secondary one in those who love much. 
Be sure he cannot love another much who loves 
not honor more. For that higher affection sus- 
tains and elevates the lower human one, casting 
round it a glory which mere personal feeling 

could never give. F. W. Robertson. 

Your love, — vouchsafe it, royal-hearted Few, 

And I will set no common price thereon ; 
Oh, I will keep, as Heaven his holy blue. 

Or Night her diamonds, that dear treasure won. 
But aught of inward faith nmst I forego. 

Or miss one drop from Truth's baptismal hand. 
Think poorer thoughts, pray cheaper prayers, and 
grow 

Less worthy trust, to meet your heart's de- 
mand, — 
Farewell ! — your wish I for your sake deny : 
Rebel to love in truth to love am I. D. A. wasson. 



158 BECKONINGS. 

18 September. How sweet is the prayer of 
the virgin heart to its love ! Thy virtues won 
me. With virtue preserve me ! Dost thou love 
me ? Keep me, then, still worthy to be loved ! 

Sm Philip Sidney. 

Each moment, as we nearer drew to each, 
A stern respect withheld us further yet, 

So that we seemed beyond each other's reach, 
And less acquainted than when first we met. 

If I but love that virtue which he is. 

Though it be scented in the morning air, 

Still shall we be truest acquaintances. 

Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare. 

H. D. Thoeeau. 

19 September. 

Oh, call me but thy Friend ! 

Seek thou no other word when thou wouldst 
pour 
Thy soul in mine ; for this unto the core 

Of Love doth pierce, and in it comprehend ' 
All secrets of its lore. 

— This " Friend " 
Is like a full-stringed chord, that still doth seem 

Within its sound to gather up and blend 
All, all that life in other lives that takes 
Away life's curse of barrenness, and makes 

Our being's sweet and often-troubled dream. 

I never used it lightly ; unto me 
A sacredness hung round it ; for a Sign 

I held it, of our common words that be 
Initial letters of a speech divine. 

Oh, take this coin, too oft to worthless ends 



HEART UNTO HEART. 159 

Profaned, and see upon its circlet shine 
One Image fair, one legend never dim ! 
This word by Him 
Was used at parting : " I have called you 
Friends,'^ Dora Greenwell. 

He hides himself within the love 

Of those whom we love best : 
The smiles and tones that make our homes 

Are shrines by Him possessed. 
He tents within the lonely heart, 

And shepherds every thought ; 
We find Him not by seeking long ; 

We lose Him not, unsought. w. c, Gannett. 

20 September. No : there is not one sacred 
hour of the heart's intercourse with others, in 
which we are not looking to, and living upon, the 
Unseen. The eye that looks on us is but the 
material organ of an unseen spirit's love : the 
familiar voice that speaks to us draws its tones 
from an unsearchable heart, whose life is hid 
with God : the very hand that is clasped in ours 
has a pressure of tenderness that belongs not to 
flesh and blood, and is an impress from the un- 
seen soul. 

Blessed then be God, that they are the things 
that are seen that are temporal, and the things 
that are unseen that are everlasting ! 

J. H. Thom. 

He spake of love, such love as spirits feel 
In worlds whose course is equable and pure ; 



IGO BECKOXINGS. 

No fears to beat aTrav. no strife to heal, 

The past iinsighed for. and the future sure ; 
Spake, as a witness, of a second buth 
Fo/ all that is most perfect upon earth. 

WORDSWOBTH. 

21 September. What, then, is the true way 
of loving one's friends ? It is to love them in 
God, to love God in them : to love what He has 
made them, and to bear, for love of Him, with 
what He has not made them. The love of God. 
loving fi'iends apart from self, knows how to love 
patiently through all their faults. What is lack- 
ing in any one it knows may yet be made up. if 

God wills. Fen-elon. 

But if He gTant a friend, that boon possessed 
Indeed is treasure, and crowns all the rest : 
And giving one whose heart is in the skies, 
Born fi'om above, and made divinely wise, 
He gives what bankru^^t Xatm-e never can, 
Whose noblest coin is light and brittle man, — 
Gold purer far than Ophir ever knew. — 
A soul, an image of Himself, and therefore true. 

COWPER. 

22 September. To pray together, in what- 
ever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brother- 
hood of hope and sympathy that men can con- 
tract in this life. ^tiADAMz de Stael. 

Mystical, more than magical, is that commun- 
ing of soul with soul, both looking heavenward. 
Here properly soul first speaks with soul ; for 



HEART UNTO HEART. 161 

only in looking heavenward, take it in what sense 
you may, not in looking earthward, does what 
we can call union, mutual love, society, begin to 
be possible. Caelyle. 

23 September. If souls please thee, be they 
loved in God : for they too are mutable, but in 
Him are they firmly established ; else would they 
pass, and pass away. In Him, then, be they be- 
loved ; and carry unto Him along with thee what 
souls thou canst, and say to them, " Him let us 
love ; Him let us love." See, there He is, where 

truth is loved ! Saint Augustine. 

Love all for Jesus, but Jesus for Himself. He 
alone is found Good and Faithful above all 
friends. For Him, and in Him, let friends and 
foes be dear unto thee. Thomas a Kempis. 

By the deep stirring of my heart 

In yearning after Thee, 
By all the longing of the life 

That leaneth unto Thee, — 
As human friend to human friend, — 

Can I so think of Thee ? 
Like human love with human love 

Will heavenly rapture be ? 
Such more than human blessedness 

Be meant in truth for me ? 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 

24 September. I think that the two things 
above all others that have made men in all ages 



162 BECKONINGS. 

believe in immortality, — apart, so far as we know, 
from any revelation save that which is written on 
the human heart, — have been the broken loves 
and the broken friendships of the world. 

Men could not believe that this young life, 
broken off so suddenly, was done forever. It 
suggested its own continuance. Instinctively 
friendship triumphed over the grave. Love was 
too strong for death. Phillips Bkooks. 

Gentle eyes we closed below, 

Tender voices heard once more, 
Smile and call us, as they go 

On and onward, still before. 
Guided thus, O friend of mine ! 

Let us walk our little way, 
Knowing by each beckoning sign 

That we are not quite astray. 

J. G. Whittier. 

25 September. The love that will be anni- 
hilated sooner than be treacherous, has already 
made death impossible, and affirms itself no 
mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and 
inextinguishable being. R. w. Emerson. 

These eyes again thine eyes shall see ; 
Thy hands again these hands infold. 
Were not our souls immortal made, 
Our equal loves can make them such. 

Edward Herbert. 

26 September. If it be God who gave us 
these affections, and pronounced His own work 



HEART UNTO HEART. 163 

good, will He one day suddenly change, and pro- 
nounce it evil ? He who dowered the earth with 
these strong and sweet attachments, will He de- 
nude heaven of them ? Madame de Gaspaein. 

Ah yet, when all is thought and said. 
The heart still overrules the head ; 
Still what we hope we must believe, 
And what is given to us receive ; — 
Must still believe, for still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope 
What here is faithfully begun, 
Will be completed, not undone. 
My child, we still must think, when we 
That ampler life together see. 
Some true result will yet appear 
Of what we are, together, here. 

A. H. Clough. 

27 September. 

There is another world : and some have deemed 
It is a world of music and of light, 
And human voices and delightful forms, 
, Where the material shall no more be cursed 
By dominance of evil, but become 
A beauteous evolution of pure spirit 
Opposite, but not warring, rather yielding 
New grace, and evidence of liberty : — 
Oh, may we recognize each other there ! 

A. H. Hallam. 

Dear friend, far ofP, my lost desire, 
So far, so near, in woe and weal ; 
Oh, loved the most when most I feel 

There is a lower and a hioher ! 



164 BECKONINGS. 

Known and unknown, human, divine ! 
Sweet human hand, and lips, and eye, 
Dear heavenly friend that cannot die. 

Mine, mine, forever, ever mine ! 

Strange friend, past, present, and to be ! 

Loved deeplier, darklier understood ! 

Behold, I dream a dream of good. 
And mingle all the world with thee I 

A. Tennyson. 

28 September. The Transfiguration has 
lived on through ages, and has shed its light 
upon all ages. It has brought the past into 
union with the present. Moses and Elijah have 
been felt to be not dead forms, but living men, 
because the Son of God and the Son of Man 
lives. " The decease which he should accomplish 
at Jerusalem " has been owned as the bond of 
fellowship between those who walk the earth and 
suffer in it, and those who are departed from it. 
In the light of that " countenance which was al- 
tered, of that raiment which was white and glis- 
tering," all human countenances have acquired a 
brightness, all common things have been trans- 
figured. A glimpse of the divine beauty has 
broken through the darkness, and has cheered 
the humblest pilgrims. f. d. maueice. 

Three humble friends of His, in lofty light 

S^w Him with heaven's men talking, face to face : 
Still, where He meets His friends is Tabor's 
height. 
Above the obscuring mists of time and space. 



HEART UNTO HEART. 165 

29 September. 

St, Michael and All Angels. 
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. 

John IMilton. 

What their works are we do not know, save as 
we cat(5h brief glimpses here and there : some- 
times sent forth as for guard and watch, also as 
couriers, also as convoys home of spirits depart- 
ed, also to be escort-trains for the Almighty, — 
chariots of God counting twenty thousand, even 
thousands of angels. One of them, great Michael, 
is set forth to head a war against the dragon 
power of persecution, though exactly what that 
means we may not know. Perhaps they go forth 
on excursions among distant worlds and peoples, 
reporting, for new study, what of God may be 
discovered among them. Doubtless they have 
all enough to do forever, and that which is good 
enough and high enough for their powers. 

Horace Bushnell. 

Neither are the alternations of joy and such 
sorrow as by us is inconceivable, being only as it 
were a softness and silence in the pulse of an infi- 
nite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the 
unf alien ; for the angels who rejoice over repent- 
ance cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as 
they try again and again whether they may not 
warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind 
wings. John Ruskin. 



166 BECKOXDsGS. 

30 September. And in the changes which, 
thank God ! must take place when the mortal 
puts on immortahty, shall we not feel that the 
nobler our friends are, the more they are them- 
selves ? that the more the idea of each is carried 
out in the perfection of beauty, the more like 
they are to what we thought them in our most 
exalted moods, — to that which we saw*in them 
in the rarest moments of profoundest commun- 
ion. — to that which we beheld through the veil 
of all theii^ imperfections when we loved them 
the truest. geobge MacDoxald. 

"Those who Hve in the Lord never see each 
other for the last time.'' 

If I truly love The One, 

All He loves are mine ; 
Alien to my heart is none, 

And life grows divine. 



TENTH MONTH. 



''We all do fade as a leaf That was the 
wail of the ancient prophet, when the glory of 
his nation was slowly passing into dull decay 
because of the deadness at its heart. And from 
many a grand tree the leaves fade and drop in- 
gloriously, coldly submitting to inevitable des- 
tiny. But in our northern woodlands, the fading 
of the leaf is a change from uniform verdure to 
many-hued magnificence ; it is a ripening and a 
blossoming, no less than a fading. The tree does 
not reveal its crown-jewels until it is about to 
lay them aside ; then, for a few days, the forests 
are burdened with the splendors of abdicating 
sovereignty. The October leaf-fading is a festi- 
val, a triumphal pageant, rather than a funeral. 

The ripening of beauty out of the tree's life 
into its autumnal leafage is no less a mystery, is 
perhaps a more deeply spiritual mystery, than the 
ripening of its fruit. For it is as if every drop 
of the hidden sap sought to express itself in 
glowing color — to say, " It is glorious to live 
and to die ! " and to say it with most eloquent 
intensity in its final hour. 

So the tree of humanity is meant not only to 



168 BECKONINGS. 

bear fruit, but to be a glory upon the earth, and 
to be most glorious in its heroisms and sacrifices, 
in the la3ring down of life that it may be taken 
up again, renewed in other lives whose roots are 
to be nourished by its temporary decay. 

The hoary head is a crown of glory when its 
splendors of thought, and faith, and aspiration 
have been shaped by the life-long working of 
spiritual elements, by the indwelling of the Di- 
vine Spirit Himself. Character, human charac- 
ter, fashioned after the image of the heavenly, is 
the crown of glory that fadeth not away. Death 
cannot dim its radiance. The crown is only 
seemingly laid aside for a time, to be worn, eter- 
nally brightening, in the kingdom of God. 



OCTOBER. 

AMONG THE SHEAVES. 

1 October. Thought and the struggle after 
truth are the best joys of the best men. To fol- 
low out the lines of speculation and revelation 
until they lead us near the heart of things, which 
yet we know we can never perfectly reach ; to 
make some few steps forward on the journey 
which stretches out before us, endlessly tempting 
and interesting, into eternity ; to add each day 
some new stone to the structure whose lines al- 
ready, as they leave the earth, prophesy an infi- 
nite height for the far top-stone, — he has not 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 169 

lived who has not felt this pleasure. He is not 
really living, however full he may be of warmth 
of feeling, and of energy in action, who does not 
in some degree know what it is to crave ideas 
and knowledge, to seek for truth, and to delight 

in finding it. Phillips Brooks. 

2 October. That glorious word Know I — 
it is God's attribute, and includes in itself all 
others. Love — truth — all are parts of that 
awful power of Knowing, at a single glance, from 
and to all eternity, what a thing is in its essence, 
its properties, and its relations to the whole uni- 
verse through all time. I feel awe-struck when- 
ever I use that word rightly. Charles Kingsley. 

Philosophy is properly a home-sickness, — a 
longing to be everywhere at home. Novalis. 

3 October. That one man should die igno- 
rant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a 
tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times 
in the minute, as by some computations it does. 

Carlyle. 

A man should be a guest in his own house and 
a guest in his own thought. He is there to speak 
for truth ; but who is he ? Some clod the truth 
has snatched from the ground, and with fire has 
fashioned to a momentary man. Without the 
truth he is a clod again. r. w. emerson. 

4 October. The human intellect has had 



170 BECKONTNGS. 

placed before it by Him who made it, one object 
and one only, worthy of its efforts ; and that is 
Truth, — truth, not for the sake of any ulterior 
object, however high or holy, but truth for its 
own sake. We must seek and desire truth even 
as though it existed by and for itself alone. 

Dean Staslby. 

He who abandons the personal search for 
truth, under whatever pretext, abandons truth. 

He>":ey Dkummont). 

5 October. It is no proof of a man's under- 
standing to be able to confirm what he pleases : 
but to be able to discern that what is true is truo, 
and that what is false is false, tliis is the mark 
and character of intelligence. Swkdexborg. 

Knowledo^e and wisdom, far from beinc^ one, 
Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells 
In heads replete with thoughts of other men ; 
Wisdom in minds attentive to theb own. 
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much : 
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. 

COWPER. 

6 October. Simple and sincere minds are 
never more than half mistaken. JorBEBx. 

The single eye alone can see 

All truths around us thrown, 
In their eternal unity ; 

The humble ear alone 
Has room to hold and time to prize 
The sweetness of life's harmonies. 

Aubrey de Verb. 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 171 

7 October. Every one must think in his 
own way, to arrive at truth. But he ought to 
keep himself in hand ; we are too good for pure 

instinct. Goethe. 

To think what one does not feel is to lie to 
one's self. Joubert. 

8 October. One man is as good as a mil- 
lion, when he stands for a great truth, and is 

clothed with its authority and majesty. 

E. H. Sears. 

Stand upright ! speak thy thoughts ! declare 

The truth thou hast, that all may share ! 

Be bold ! proclaim it everywhere ! 

They only live, who dare. L. Mobeis. 

9 October. The irmest and noblest ground 
on which people can live is the truth ; the real 
with the real ; a ground on which nothing is as- 
sumed, but where they speak and think and do 
what they must, because they are so and ];iot 
otherwise. R. w. emeeson. 

" Thou must be true thyself, 

If thou the truth wouldst teach. — 
Think truly, and thy thoughts 

Will the world's famine feed : 
Speak truly, and each word of thine 

Will be a fruitful seed : 
Live truly, and thy life will be 

A great and noble creed." 



172 BECKOXIXGS. 

10 October. The man whom Xature has 
appointed to do great things is. first of all. fm^- 
nished with that openness to Nature which ren- 
ders him incapable of being insincere. He is 
under the noble necessity' of being ti^ue. 

Cablyxb. 

Wisdom is a pearl with most success 

Sought in still water and beneath clear skies. 

COWPEB.. 

11 October. Imarination. far from beinof an 
enemy to Truth, brings it forward more than any- 
other faculty of the mind. Madamf. de Stakl. 

I would not always reason. The straight path 
Wearies us with its never-varving lines. 
And we grow melancholy. I would make 
Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit 
Patiently by the wayside, while I traced 
The mazes of the pleasant wilderness 
Around me. She should be my counselor, 
But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs 
Impulses from a deeper source than hers, 
And there are motions in the mind of man 
That she must look upon with awe. 

W. C. Betan-t. 

12 October. Few minds are spacious : few 
even have a vacant place in them. Almost all 
have capacities that are narrow and occupied by 
some knowledge that stops them up. To enjoy 
itself and let others enjoy it. a mind should ever 
keep itself larger than its own thoughts. 

JOUBEET. 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 173 

Fine thoughts are wealth, for the right use of 

which 
Men are, and ought to be, accountable, 
If not to Thee, to those they influence. 
Grant this, we pray Thee, and that all who read 
Or utter noble thoughts, may make them theirs, 
And thank God for them, to the betterment 
Of their succeeding life. P. J. Bailey. 

13 October. All truly wise thoughts have 
been thought already thousands of times ; but, to 
make them truly ours, we must think them over 
again honestly, till they take root in our personal 
experience. Goethe. 

The truly great 
Have all one age, and from one visible space 
Shed influence. They, both in power and act. 
Are permanent, and Time is not with them. 
Save as it worketh for them, they in it. 

S. T. Coleridge. 

14 October. In conversation seek not so 
much either to vent thy knowledge, or to increase 
it, as to know more spiritually and effectually 
what thou dost know. And in this way those 
mean despised truths that every one thinks he is 
sufficiently seen in, will have a new sweetness 
and use in them, which thou didst not so well 
perceive before (for these flowers cannot be 
sucked dry), and in this humble, sincere way 
thou shalt grow in grace and knowledge. 

Robert Leighton. 



174 BECKONINGS. 

We are wrong, always, when we think too much 
Of what we think or are. mes. Beowxln-g. 

15 October. How can a man leam to know 

himself ? By reflection never ; only hy action. 
In the measure in which thou seekest to do thy 
duty shalt thou know what is in thee. But what 
is thy duty ? — The demand of the hour. 

GrOETHE. 

Wisdom doth hve with children round her knees ; 
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly 
walk 

Of the mind's business. Wobdswoeth. 

16 October. The mind should he allowed 
to dwell only on thoughts that are happy, satisfy- 
ing, or perfect. Happy thoughts I we have them 
when we expect them, and are in a state to re- 
ceive them. JouBEET. 

Education should be tender and severe, and 
not cold and soft. Joubeet. 

17 October. The poorest education that 
teaches self-control, is better than the best that 
neglects it. Steeltn-g. 

A teacher who tries to awaken the sympathetic 
mterest of young persons in a single noble deed, 
or a single really good and heroic poem, does 
more towards his true growth than one who can 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 175 

tell off before him the names and describe the 
appearance of thousands of the inferior animals ; 
for the upshot of all that curious study of low 
organisms is simply what we know already, — 
that man, and man alone, has in a peculiar and 
special sense been created in the image of God. 
Always and everywhere the proper study of man- 
kind is man. Goethe. 

18 October. I have learned to perceive that 
where good men have clung to a superstition, or 
a form, or a narrow miserable view, it is for the 
sake of some deep truth with which it seems to 
stand connected, and which I believe as well as 
they. So in the speculations so common in these 
days our sin is likely to be contempt. 

F. W. Robertson. 

Every wide-spread error contains a concealed 
truth. That is the point on which we must fas- 
ten if we wish to overthrow the error. 

Dean Stanley. 

19 October. The truth is that ignorance 
and indifference are almost the same : we are 
sure to grow interested, as fast as our knowledge 
extends, in any subject whatever. 

W. B. O.Peabody. 

Know that pride, 
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, 
Is littleness ; that he who feels contempt 
For any living thing, hath faculties 
Which he hath never used ; that thought with him 
Is in its infancy. Woedsworth. 



176 BECKONINGS. 

20 October. He never truly believed who 
was not fii^st made sensible and convinced of un- 
belief. 

Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the 
disposition to believe, and doubt in order that 
you may end in believing the truth. 

ROBEET LeIGHTOK. 

To know a truth well, one must have fought it 

out. XOVALE. 

21 October. Take care of the truth, and 
the errors will take care of themselves. You 
may destroy a hundred heresies, and yet not es- 
tabhsh a single truth. But you may, by estab- 
lishing a single truth, put to flight with one blow 
a hundred heresies. Dea>- Staxlet. 

It is certain, my belief gains innnitely, the mo- 
ment I can convince another mind thereof. 

XOTAIIS. 

22 October. 

If e'er, when faith had fallen asleep, 

I heard a voice, " Beheve no more ! '* 

And heard an ever-brealdng shore 
That tuDibled in the Godless deep ; 
A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part ; 

And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answered. " I have felt ! " 
No, like a child in doubt and fear : 

But that blind clamor made me wise ; 

Then was I as a child that cries. 
But, crying, knows his Father near. 

-Vlfezd Tex>-yson. 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 177 

23 October. Let any one fix his attention 
on a moral truth, and it spreads out and enlarges 
its dimensions beneath his view, till what seemed 
at first as barren a proposition as words could 
express, appears like an interesting and glorious 
truth, momentous in its bearing on the destinies 
of men. And so it is with every material thing. 
Let the mind be intently fixed upon it, and hold 
it in the light of science, and it gradually unfolds 
new wonders. w. b. o. Peabody. 

We boast our light, but if we look not wisely 
on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness. The 
light which we have gained was given us, not to 
be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward 
things, now remote from all knowledge. 

John Milton. 

24 October. The whole of human knowl- 
edge hangs together, and its centre is in human- 
ity itself, and the centre of humanity is Christian 
love. Therefore, let all knowledge, even to the 
utmost detail, group itself around the acknowl- 
edged centre. Seize upon each piece of knowl- 
edge that comes to you, and attach it to your 
own life. Every fact has something Divine in it. 
It comes in God's order, and .may be brought to 
bear in some way on your knowledge of men 
and your own work among them. 

W. H. Feeemantle. 

A thought is deep in proportion as it is near 
God. To be deep you must see the subject in 
its relation to God, yourself, and the universe ; 



178 BECKONING S. 

and the more harmonious and simple it seems, 
the nearer God and the deeper it is. 

Chables Kingslet. 

25 October. What I know of myself I 
know by Thy shining upon me ; and what I 
know not of myself, so long I know it not, until 
my darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy 

countenance. Saint Augustdjb. 

AU 
Are blessed, even as their sight descends 
Deeper into the truth, wherein rest is 
For every mind. Thus happiness hath root 
In seeing, not in loving, which of sight 
Is aftergrowth. Dantb. 

We needs must love the highest, when we see it. 

Tennyson. 

26 October. I think that the first condi- 
tion of any permanent hold on truth is this : that 
the truth itself should be live enough and large 
enough to open constantly and bring to every 
new condition through which we pass some new 
experience of itself. The truth that is narrow 
and partial we outgrow ; only the truth that is 
broad and complete grows up into us and can be 
kept. The one is like the clothes of childhood 
that are cast aside ; the other is like the live 
body that grows up with the growing soul, and 
at each stage offers it a fit instrument for its 
work and a fit medium through which to receive 
its education^ phuj^ips bbooks. 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 179 

27 October. We are surrounded by mys- 
tery. Mind is more real than matter. Our souls 
and God are real. Of the reality of nothing 
else are we sure : it floats before us a fantastic 
shadow-world. Mind acts on mind. The Eter- 
nal Spirit blends mind with mind, soul with soul, 
and is moving over us all with His mystic inspi- 
ration every hour. F. W. Robertson. 

Our many deeds, the thoughts that we have 
thought, — 
They go out from us thronging every hour ; 
And in them all is folded up a power 
That on the earth doth move them to and fro ; 
And mighty are the marvels they have wrought 
In hearts we know not, and may never know. 

F. W. Faber. 

28 October. Who would grieve, although 
there are some enclosed spots, quietudes in Cre- 
ation, which will be unexplored, unpenetrated 
forever ? Who that has felt the soft healing of 
Evening, can regret that even in the intellectual 
world there are regions into which faintness and 
weariness may sometimes flee, and take shelter 
and repose, away from the scorch and glare of 
oppressive light ? Sweet and inviting mysteries, 
among whose gentle shadows Hope, and Fear, 
and all unnamed yearnings tremblingly advance, 
and find or fashion for themselves images of pu- 
rity, convictions of immortality, vistas of a long 
life to come, through which the soul may wander. 



180 BECKONINGS. 

freer and greater than now, " having gained the 
privilege by virtue ! " J. P. Nichol. 

29 October. No man's soul is alone : Laoc- 
oon or Tobit. the serpent has it by the heart or 
the angel by the hand : the light or the fear of 
the spiritual things that move beside it may be 
seen on the body. John Ruskin. 

Our acts our Angels are, or good or ill ; 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 
Man is his own Star, and that soul that can 
Be honest, is the only perfect man. 

John Fletcher. 

30 October. " They supposed they had seen 
a spirit." How naturally does St. Luke describe 
just the confused apprehensions which have 
haunted men in all ages ! They tliink they see 
spirits. Every hour they are conversing with 
spiritual beings. Every message of affection 
which reaches us is a spiritual message. Every 
word which depresses or elevates us comes not 
from a material, but from a spiritual source. Our 
consciences and our reasons are ours, because we 
are spiritual ; we address the conscience and rea- 
son of other men because we own them to be 
spiritual. F. D. maueice. 

We see but half the causes of our deeds, 
Seeking them only in the outer life, 
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world, 
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us 
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes. 

J. R. Lo\^'ELL. 



AMONG THE SHEAVES. 181 

31 October. All-Hallow Eve, We do not 
hear less of spirits, less of spiritual communica- 
tions in this day than in former days. They do 
not assume less vulgar or less frivolous shapes. 

I believe we shall rise out of our delusions, if 
we can say to every man, " There is a communi- 
cation with the unseen world. The Son of God 
has established it forever in Himself. Therefore 
thou art not the servant of demons or spirits of 
the air. Therefore thou art not to play tricks 
with that which should be to thee awful, wonder- 
ful, blessed. Seek fellowship with the unseen in 
Him who is the Head of both worlds. Leave 
other roads to those who do not own the glory of 
man, his relation to God." r. d. maukice. 

They are alive, who seemed to die ; 
In every breeze a soul goes by. 
And whispers, " There is nothing dead ; 
Life stirs the very dust you tread." 

Haunted is every spot below ; 
Spirits around us come and go, 
Opening earth's doors to heavenly air ; 
"With us forever, everywhere ! 



ELEVENTH MONTH. 



Christian legend has woven into the associa- 
tions of the month which is traditionally the sad- 
dest and dreariest of the twelve — November — 
the tenderest thoughts and the most sacred inspi- 
rations. It opens with All-Saints' Day, and is 
heralded by the picturesque idealisms of All-Hal- 
low Eve. 

Surely it cannot be a superstition only which 
has consecrated one evening in the year to the 
thought of all souls, whether lingering in their 
mortal bodies, or released into spiritual freedom. 
It is good for us to keep in mind the vastness 
of the family to which we belong, the universal 
brotherhood, the life in God, which is our eternal 
bond of union. 

All-Saints' Day symbolizes the home-coming of 
souls to their Father's House. Not all have yet 
returned. Some are wandering in the midnight 
and the storm ; but this day dawns for them, no 
less than for those who have found shelter in the 
secret place of the Most High : and by the glad- 
ness and the warmth which radiate from that 
holy hearth-stone, the lost ones will find their way 
back, if they will but turn their faces thither- 
ward. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 183 

What thought is so grand as this, — that we 
are inalienably related to the pure and the holy 
in all ages and climes, if we but share their divine 
sympathies, and breathe with them the spiritual 
breath which not only the disciples of Jesus, but 
all seekers of His truth, have felt thrilling their 
inmost being from the Lord's words, " Eeceive 
ye the Holy Ghost ! " To breathe with Him the 
God-life of self-sacrificing love, is the only saint- 
liness. His breath makes summer in the air of a 
wintry world, when the trees are despoiled of 
their glory and beauty, and the song of the 
streams is frozen to silence. 

And November is Thanksgiving-month. The 
homely Puritan anniversary blends itself with the 
ancient festival of All-Saints and All Souls : — 

*' Homeward we haste to Heaven's Thanksgiving, 
The harvest-gathering of the heart." 



NOVEMBER. 

HEAVEN-LIFE ON EAKTH. 

1 November. All-Saints' Day, How large 
a part of our God-ward life is traveled not by 
clear landmarks seen far off in the promised 
land, but as travelers climb a mountain - peak, 
by putting footstep after footstep slowly and 
patiently into the prints which some one, going 
before us, with keener sight, with stronger nerves, 
tied to us by the cord of saintly sympathy, has 



184 BECKONINGS. 

planted deep into the pathless snow of the bleak 
distance that stretches up between humanity and 
God! 

We ascend by one another. No man liveth to 
himself, and no man dieth to himself. We live 

and die not only to God but to each other. 

Phtllips Brooks. 

Where now with pain thou treadest, trod 
The whitest of the saints of God ! 
To show thee where their feet were set, 
The light which led them shineth yet. 

J. G. Whittier. 

2 November. As pilgrims, we approach the 
great saints, and commune with them in spirit, 
killing the distance of time and space. We enter 
into them, and they into us. In our souls we 
cherish them, and imbibe their character and 
principles. They may be made to live and grow 

in us. Keshub Chuxder Sen. 

And still the heavens lie open as of old 
To the entranced gaze ; ay, nearer far. 
And brighter than of yore ; and Might is there, 
And Infinite Purity is there, and high 
Eternal Wisdom, and the calm clear face 
Of Duty ; and a higher, stronger Love 
And Light in one, and a new reverend Name, 
Greater than any and combining all : 
And over all, veiled with a veil of cloud, 
God set far off, too bright for mortal eyes. 

Edwin Morris. 

3 November. I will frankly tell you that 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 185 

my experience in prolonged scientific investiga- 
tions convinces me that a belief in God — a God 
who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing- 
points of human knowledge — adds a wonderful 
stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate 
into the regions of the unknown. Of myself, 
I may say that I never make preparations for 
penetrating into some small province of nature 
hitherto undiscovered, without breathing a prayer 
to the Being who hides His secrets from me only 
to allure me graciously on to the unfolding of 

them. Louis Agassiz. 

Is not prayer also a study of truth, — a sally 

of the soul into the unfound infinite ? No man 

ever prayed heartily without learning something. 

R. W. Emerson. 

4 November. 

Three blissful words I name to thee. 

Three words of potent charm, 
From eating care thy heart to free, 
Thy life to shield from harm ; — 
Pray, work, and sing ! 

John Stuart Blackie. 

Whate'er 't is good to wish, ask that of Heaven, 
Though it be what thou canst not hope to see : 

Pray to be perfect, though material leaven 
Forbid the spirit so on earth to be : 

But if for any wish thou darest not pray, 

Then pray to God to cast that wish away ! 

Hartley Coleridge. 

6 November. In prayer, man is a laborer 



186 BECKONINGS. 

together with his God. We have had enough in 
our day of the shallow evangel of labor, man's 
gospel preached to man ; we have been told till 
we weary of hearing it, that "he whd works, 
prays " ; but let us lift up our hearts high enough 
to meet a fuller, deeper, richer truth ; let us 
learn that " he who prays, works " ; works even 
with his God ; is humble enough, is bold enough 
to help Him who upholds all things by the word 
of His power. dora Geeenwell. 

Not tni the soul acts with all its strength, 
strains its every faculty, does prayer begin. 

Frances Power Cobbb. 

6 November. A man beholds himself at 
his best when he prays. He realizes his whole 
future. He is incarnated to himself in his own 
destiny. The past in the shape of its prophets, 
the future in the shape of the kingdom of God, 
surround us when we pray. P. c. Mozoomdae. 

Prayer is the world-plant's purpose, the bright 

flower, 
The ultimate meaning of the stem and leaves. — 
Who uses prayer, a friend shall never miss ; 
If he should slip, a timely staff and kind. 
Placed in his grasp by hands unseen, shall find ; 
Sometimes upon his forehead a soft kiss ; 
And arms cast round him gently from behind. 

H. S. Sutton. 

7 November. The true prayer is that of 
the heart, and the heart prays^ only through its 
desires. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 187 

We pray without ceasing when we unceasingly 
retain true love and true desire in our hearts. 
Love, hidden in the soul, prays constantly, even 
when the mind is drawn another way. 

We wish all and we wish nothing. What God 
wills to give us is exactly what we should have 
chosen ; for we wish all that He wills, and only 
what He wills. Fenelon. 

When one that holds communion with the skies 
Has filled his urn where these pure waters rise. 
And once more mingles with us meaner things, 
'T is even as if an angel shook his wings : 
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide. 
That tells us whence his treasures are supplied. 
So when a ship, well freighted with the stores 
The sun matures on India's spicy shores. 
Has dropped her anchor, and her canvas furled 
In some safe haven of our western world, 
'T were vain inquiry to what port she went ; 
The gale informs us, laden with the scent. 

COWPEE. 

8 November. Prayer seeks that which lies 
below all words. From those who pray as chil- 
dren one desires only to learn; their lives are 
better and more beautiful commentaries upon 
their prayers than any the schools can furnish. 

F. D. Maueice. 

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought 
by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy 
voice 



188 BECKONINGS. 

Rise like a fountain for me night and day ! 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them 

friend ? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 

Alfred Tennyson. 

9 November. What we desire for ourselves 
and for our race — the greatest redemption we 
can dream of — is gathered up in the words, 
" Thine is the glory." 

Self-wiUing, self-seeking, self-glorying, — here 
is the curse. No shackles remain when these 
are gone : nothing can be wanting when the spirit 
sees itself, loses itself in Him who is Light, and 
in whom is no darkness at all. In these words, 
therefore, we see the ground and consummation 
of our prayer ; they show how prayer begins and 
ends in sacrifice and adoration. They teach us 
how prayer, which we might fancy was derived 
from the wants of an imperfect, suffering crea- 
ture, belongs equally to the redeemed and per- 
fected. In these the craving for independence 
has ceased; they are content to ask and to re- 
ceive. But their desire of knowledge and love 
never ceases. They have awaked up after His 
likeness, and are satisfied with it : but the thought, 
" Thine is the glory," opens to them a vision 
which must become wider and brighter forever 
and ever. f. d. maueice. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 189 

10 November. It is not in prayer only that 
the soul approaches God, for it is drawn nigher 
Him by all the higher objects it turns to. If a 
poet will sing his noblest strain, it is into the ear 
of God he does it ; if an architect will build in 
his sublimest manner, it is a house for God he 
makes. And every earnest movement of the mind 
of man is upwards, and to God, — making us 
sure of the Divine Presence. Mountford, 

" The noblest prayer is when one evermore 
Grows inly liker Him he kneels before." 

11 November. Christ not only prayed, but 
He was prayer. Prayer was incarnate in him. 
He prayed without ceasing. From the moment 
of His baptism to the awful moment when He 
committed His soul into the hands of the Father 
on the cross, did He not continually look up ? He 
looked up to Heaven for light, strength and guid- 
ance. And what is prayer but looking up ? 

When the true prayer is breathed, earth and 
heaven, the past and future, say Amen. And 
Christ prayed such prayers. P. c. Mozoomdar. 

The Lord's Prayer is a mighty prayer. Ye 
know not what ye pray for in it. God is Him- 
self the Kingdom, and in that Kingdom He 
reigns in all intelligent creatures. Therefore, 
what we ask for is God Himself with all His 
riches. That His name should be hallowed in 
us, means that He should reign in us, and accom- 



190 BECKONINGS. 

plish through us His true work. And thus is His 
will done here on earth as it is in heaven : that 
is, when it is done in us as it is in Himself, in 
the Heaven which He Himself is. John tauleb. 

12 November. 

As some rare perfume in a vase of clay 
Pervades it with a fragrance not its own, 

So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul, 

All heaven's own sweetness seems around it 
thrown. 

Abide in me ! There have been moments blest, 
When I have heard Thy voice and felt Thy 
power ; 

Then evil lost its grasp ; and passion, hushed. 
Owned the divine enchantment of the hour. 

These were but seasons, beautiful and rare : 
Abide in me, and they shall ever be I 

Fulfill at once Thy precept and my prayer : 
Come, and abide in me, and I in Thee ! 

Mrs. H. B. Stowe. 

13 November. Blessed are the ears that 
gladly receive the pulses of the Divine whisper, 
and give no heed to the many whisperings of this 
world. 

Blessed are the eyes which are shut to out- 
ward things, but are intent on things within. 

Blessed are they that enter far into inward 
things, and endeavor to prepare themselves daily 
more and more for the receiving of heavenly 
secrets. Thomas a Kempis. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 191 

To keep the lamp alive. 

With oil we fill the bowl : 
'T is water makes the willow thrive, 

And grace that feeds the soul. 
Man's wisdom is to seek 

His strength in God alone ; 
And even an angel would be weak 

Who trusted in his own. Cowpbr. 

14 November. Christianity is not a religion, 
as religion has usually been understood, — a sys- 
tem of worship abstracted from the common life 
of men. It came to bind men together in just 
and true relations, to infuse into their societies 
the Divine Spirit, to transfigure the coarse ves- 
ture of humanity with that divinity which is love, 
till it shall become a temple in which He dwells. 

W. H. Freemantle. 

Self-sacrifice is the essential mark of the Chris- 
tian, and the absence of it is sufficient at once to 
condemn the man who calls himself by that name 
and yet has it not, and to declare that he has no 
right to it. Bolton. 

15 November. The more spiritual is a man's 
religion, the more expansive and broad it always 
is. A stream may leave its deposits in the pool 
it flows through, but the stream itself hurries on 
to other pools in the thick woods. And so God's 
gifts a soul may selfishly appropriate ; but God 
Himself, the more truly a soul possesses Him, 
the more truly it will long and try to share Him. 

Phillips Brooks. 



192 BECKONINGS. 

O rare sweet winds from Thy hills that blow ! 
O River so calm in its crystal flow ! 
O Love unf athomed — the depth, the height ! 
What joy wilt Thou not unto me impart, 
When Thou shalt enlarge my heart ? 

16 November. Christianity is not a theory 

or a speculation ; but a life : — not a philosophy 

of life, but a life and a living process. 

S. T. Coleridge. 

Christianity does not mean what you think, or 
what I think concerning Christ, but is of Christ. 
My Christianity, if I ever come to have any, will 
be what of Christ is in me ; your Christianity 
now is what of Christ is in you. 

Geoege MacDonald. 

17 November. The Christ has passed 
through human life and human death, bearing 
all our burdens, connected with every individual 
of the race, not only by a bond of love, but a 
bond of relation, of brotherhood, — a bond which 
can never be broken. Eeskts-b. 

No fable old, nor m}i;hic lore, 

Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact stranded on the shore 

Of the oblivious years ; — 
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 

A present help is He ; 
And faith has still its Olivet, 

And love its Galilee. J. G. WHrmEB. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 193 

18 November. The Christ says, Run not 
hither and thither ; the Kingdom of God is within 
you. Many others have been honored as divine 
messengers or as divinities. So there have been 
incarnations conceived, — as Buddha, Hercules. 
But the history of Christ is history for the com- 
munity, and has the witness of the spirit in the 
life of faith. It is maintained in a spiritual way, 
and not by external power. Hbgel. 

No need of going from one sect to another, 
for that is only a change from one human mas- 
ter to another. The Christ involves and compre- 
hends them all, and a great deal more besides ; 
and change, with Him, is nearing the sun-bright 
summits which overlook all the fields of thought, 
and from which all the artificial lines of division 
fade away and disappear. e. h. Seaes. 

19 November. People say a church is a 
holy place. So it is if holy people be in it ; not 
else ; the kingdom is within you, not in stones. 
Where is the holiest place on earth? Where 
souls breathe the holiest vows, and execute the 

most heroic purposes. F. W. Robertson. 

It is those who understand what a church is, 
who are the least likely to rest in it, or in any- 
thing short of Him to whom it leads. 

Dora Greenwell. 

heart of mine, keep patience ! — Looking 
forth. 



194 BECKONINGS. 

As from the Mount of Vision, I behold, 
Pure, just, and free, the Church of Christ on 
earth, — 

The martyr's dream, the golden age foretold I 
And, found at last, the mystic Graal I see. 

Brimmed with His blessing, pass from lip to lip 

In sacred pledge of human fellowship. 

J. G. Whittjjsr. 

20 November. I hear men speak contin- 
ually of going to a "better world,'' rather than 
of its coming to them : but in that prayer, which 
they have straight from the lips of the Light of 
the World, there is not anything about going to 
another world ; only of another government com- 
ing into this, which will constitute it a world 
indeed ; new heavens and a new earth. " Thy 
kingdom come ; Thy will be done on earth as it 
is in heaven." John Ruskin. 

21 November. The fulfillment of the life 
of humanity in the world is in the Christ in God. 
The end is not another world. The end is the 
perfect and perfected world. And the life of 
man is not to be forever on and on, to overcome 
and still to overcome, to mark its advance by its 
journey from mile to mile, and by its transfer 
from field to field. That is the contingent of 
finite relations. The end is the consummation of 
life, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all. 

Elisha Mulpoed. 

Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly Vine, 
Within our earthly sod, 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 195 

Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God ! 

J. G. "Whittier. 

22 November. Whatever hopes of a heaven 
a neglected soul may have, can be shown to be 
an ignorant and delusive dream. How is the 
soul to escape to heaven if it has neglected for 
a lifetime the means of escape from the world 
and self ? And where is the capacity for heaven 
to come from, if it be not developed on earth ? 
Where, indeed, is even the smallest spiritual 
appreciation of God and heaven to come from, 
when so little of spirituality has ever been known 
or manifested here ? Heney Deummond. 

In imagining what is holy and divine, we take 
flight to other worlds, and conceive that there the 
film must fall away, and all adorable realities 
burst upon the sight. 

Alas I what reason have we to think any other 
station in the universe more sanctifying than our 
own ? The dimness we deplore, no traveling 
would cure : — we carry our darkness with us. 
Those to whom the earth is not consecrated will 
find their heaven profane. James Martineau. 

23 November. There is no question for a 
finite creature, in his schooling-day, like this : 
" What shall my nature be worth, and what 
amount of being shall I carry with me, when I 
enter the great world before n>e ? " 

The old trivialities are gone by, the nonsense- 



196 BECKONINGS. 

hours are over, and now it only remains to be set 
down in such quantity of being and character as 
are left, — and what shall it be ? His privilege 
was to make volume for himself ; to be so far a 
voluntary re-creator of himself; for his educa- 
tion-right was to be summed up, not in his ac- 
quirements, but in his enlargements. Is he then 
to be a stunted child when his education-day is 
over ? — that is the question, — or is he to be a 
JVLaJN"? Horace Bushnell. 

Short is the little that remains to thee of life. 
Live as on a mountain. For it makes no differ- 
ence whether a man lives here or there, if he 
lives everywhere in the world as in a civil com- 
munity. Let men see, let them know, a real 
man, who lives as he was meant to live. If they 
cannot endure him, let them kill him ; for that is 
better than to live as men do. maecus aueeuus. 

24 November. Let a man breathe out but 
one hour of the charity of God, and feel but 
one true emotion of the reconciled heart, and 
then he knows forever what is meant by immor- 
tality, and he can understand the reality of his 

own. F. W. ROBEETSON. 

Above the dissonance of time, 
And discord of its angry words, 

I hear the everlasting chime — 
The music of un jarring chords. 

I bid it welcome ; and my haste 
To join it cannot brook delay. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 197 

O song of morning, come at last ! 
And ye who sing it, come away ! 

H. BONAE. 

25 November. I have had some thoughts, on 
the first coming of which into my mind I clasped 
my hands and said, ^' O, not of my own thinking 
are these, hut Thy glorious sending, O my soul's 
God, thou God of truth ! " And sometimes I 
have had such beauty in my soul, that I could 
not but believe it a something out of heaven. 

MOUNTPOED. 

In some hour of solemn jubilee 
The massy gates of Paradise are thrown 
Wide open, and forth come, in fragments wild, 
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, 
And odors snatched from beds of amaranth. 
The favored good man in his lonely walk 
Perceives them, and his silent spirit drinks 
Strange bliss, which he shall recognize in heaven. 

S. T. Coleridge. 

26 November. 

O feet grown weary as ye walk. 

Where down life's hill my pathway lies, 
What care I while my soul can mount, 

As the young eagle mounts the skies ? 

O eyes with weeping faded out, 
What matters it how dim ye be ? 

My inner vision sweeps untired 

The reaches of eternity. Ph<ebb Cary. 

My pulses faint and fainter beat ; 
My faith takes wider bounds : 



198 BECKONINGS. 

I feel grow firm beneath my feet 

The green, immortal grounds. 

Alice Oast 

27 November. 

I am not earth-born, though I here delay : 

Hope's child, I summon infiniter powers, 
And laugh to see the mild and sunny day 

Smile on the shrunk and thin autumnal hours : 
I laugh ; for hope hath happy place with me : 
If my bark sink, 't is to another sea. 

W. E. Channing. 

Another sea, — pure sky its waves. 
Whose beauty hides no heaving graves, — 
A sea aU haven, whereupon 
No hapless bark to wreck hath gone. 

And so, 'mid storm or calm, my bark 
With snowy wake still nears her mark : 
Cheerly the trades of being blow. 
And sweeping down the wind I go. 

D. A. Wasson. 

28 November. If Christ had done nothing 
more for humanity than give it this word sleep 
in place of death, He would have been the great- 
est of benefactors. He taught new truth about 
death, or that it is not what it seems. It is to life 
what sleep is to the day. Sleep rests and restores 
the body to a fuUer and fresher life. Christ 
would not have called death sleep merely be- 
cause of its external likeness ; His thought struck 
deeper than that ; he meant that death does for 
us what sleep does for the body ; repairs, invig- 
orates, and repeats for us the morning of life. 

T. T. Mugger. 



HEAVEN-LIFE ON EARTH. 199 

" Sleep soft, beloved I " we sometimes say, 
But have no power to charm away- 
Sad dreams that through the eyelids creep. 
But never doleful dream again 
Shall break the happy slumber, when 
He giveth His beloved sleep. 

Mrs. E. B. Browning. 

29 November. All death in nature is birth. 
There is no killing principle in nature, for nature 
throughout is life ; it is not death which kills, 
but the higher life, which, concealed behind the 
other, begins to develop itself. Death and birth 
are but the struggle of life with itself to attain a 
higher form. Fichte. 

Yea, in the slow decaying of a rose 

God works, as well as in the unfolding bud. 

He works with gentleness unspeakable 

In death itself ; a thousand times more careful 

Than even the mother by her sick child watching. 

Leopold Schefer. 

30 November. 

O Elsie ! what a lesson thou dost teach me ! — 
To me the thought of death is terrible, 
Having such hold on life. To thee it is not 
So much even as the lifting of a latch ; 
Only a step into the open air. 
Out of a tent already luminous 
With light that shines through its transparent 
walls. H. W. Longfellow. 

Bid me good-by now. 
As going at night to my room : 



200 BECKONINGS. 

If I may, I will open the door, love, 
And call to you out of the gloom. 

If I may not, the Lord is our keeper, 
And still we are both in His care, — 

You on earth, I in heaven, — both guarded, 
Both safe, till you foUow me there. 

Alfeed Noreis. 

Weep awhile, if ye are fain, — 
Sunshine still must follow rain ; — 
Only not at death — for death. 
Now I know, is that first breath 
Which our souls draw, when we enter 
Life which is of all life centre. 

Edwin Aenold. 



WINTER. 



December's sun is low ; the Year is old : 

Through fallen leaves and flying flakes of snow, 

The aged pilgrim climbs the mountain cold : — 
But look ! the summits in the afterglow ! 

The fierce winds hold their breath : the rocks give way ; 

The stars look down to guide her up the height : 
And aU around her lonely footsteps play 

Auroral waves of spiritual light. 

Nothing before her but the peak, the sky I 
Nothing ? Ah, look ! beyond is everything ! 

Over these mountains greener valleys lie ; 
A happier New Year, an eternal Spring ! 



TWELFTH MONTH. 



In midwinter, the snow-wrapped zones turn 
themselves to the sun for closer warmth, and his 
great, friendly presence seems to draw nearer, 
responding to the world's need. 

He looks in at the windows of human habita- 
tions with the lingering gaze of a guest who 
knows that he has been welcome, and regrets 
that the day's visit must be so short. The win- 
ter's sunshine has a tenderness unknown to that 
which blazes down from the zenith at midsum- 
mer, and in the pink suffusions of sunset, our 
spotless earth glows like a large white lily that 
leans so near heaven as to catch the tint of its 
invisible roses. 

And it is by no accident that Christmas comes 
to us in winter, with its heart- warming sugges- 
tions of the Divine Love that enters the e earthly 
homes of ours, to make them glorious with the 
light of immortal life. Gifts pass from friend to 
friend, — gifts that gather their true meaning 
and value from the thought of Him who gave 
and gives Himself to us, — who is the illumina- 
tion of earth, because He is the revelation of the 
inmost heart of heaven, the Sun that penetrates 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 203 

the human spirit, and makes it glow with all ten- 
der affections. In that holy warmth, hearts are 
drawn more closely towards one another around 
the firesides of earth, and by that revealing light 
they see their mutual need as members of the 
vast family that shall be gathered together in 
Him, from the remotest corners of His universe. 

Beautiful and right it is that gifts and good 
wishes should fill the air like snow-flakes at 
Christmas-tide. And beautiful is the year in its 
coming and in its going, — most beautiful and 
blessed because it is always the Year of Our 
Lord. 



DECEMBER. 

WITHIN THE VEIL. 

1 December. It ought to be placed in the 
forefront of all Christian teaching that Christ's 
mission on earth was to give men Life. " I am 
come," He said, " that ye might have Life, and 
that ye might have it more abundantly." And 
that He meant literal Life — literal, spiritual, 
and Eternal Life — is clear from the whole 
course of His teaching and acting. 

He Himself assures me, " This is Life Eternal, 
that they might know Thee, the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Do I 
not now discern the deeper meaning in "Jesus 
Christ whom Thou hast sent ? " Do I not bet- 
ter understand with what vision and rapture the 



204 BECKONINGS. 

profoundest of the disciples exclaims, " The Son 
of God is come, and hath given us an understand- 
ing that we might know Him that is true ? " 

Hekry Deummond. 

The life of the Spirit is the eternal life of 
man. It is not bounded by these coasts of time. 
It is here and now, but it is not at this place 
to be described by the location of this place, and 
it is not at this time to be measured by the ter- 
mination of this time. It is not in the past, and 
it is not to be foisted away into the future ; — 
" He that believeth hath eternal life." 

Elisha Mulfokd. 

2 December. God gives His children one 
perfect all-comprehending gift — life. It is His 
own image. His very substance shared with His 
creatures. Life carries everything with it : if 
true, it may be trusted to the uttermost ; all 
things belong to it. By its own law it is endless ; 
why should life ever cease to be life ? It has but 
one enemy — sin. t. t. Munger. 

Whatever crazy sorrow saith. 

No life that breathes with human breath 

Has ever truly longed for death. 

'T is life, whereof our nerves are scant, 

Oh life, not death, for which we pant ; 

More life, and fuUer, that I want. 

Tennyson. 

3 December. 

— Life ! we 've been long together, 

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather. 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 205 

'T is hard to part, when friends are dear ; 
Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a tear : — 
Then steal away, give little warning ! 

Choose thine own time ! 
Say not Good Night! — but in some happier 
clime 
Bid me Good Morning ! A. l. barbauld. 

It is nothing to die : it is frightful not to live. 

Victor Hugo. 

4 December. My belief in the immortality 
of the soul springs from the idea of activity ; for 
when I persevere to the end in a course of rest- 
less activity, I have a sort of guarantee from 
Nature that when the present form of my exist- 
ence proves itself inadequate for the energizing 
of my spirit, she will provide another form more 

appropriate. Goethe. 

There is no more mystery in the mind living 
forever in the future, than in its having been 
kept out of life through an eternity in the past. 
It is far more incredible that from not having 
been, we are, than that from actual being we 

shall continue to he. James Martineau. 

6 December. I sometimes wonder if heaven 
will be the resurrection of our life, of our whole 
life, — if it will be the bloom-time and expansion, 
not only of our spiritual being, but of all those 
germs of natural delight which seem unable to 
unfold here. Dora Greenwei.l. 



206 BECKONINGS. 

I take it that a great part of this earthly- 
tuition and discipline is not more to work out the 
evil that is in us, than to prepare us to receive 
vrhat God has in readiness to give us. I cannot 
otherwise interpret the great and terrible with- 
holding seen in the vast majority of Hves : this 
fearful negative must mean a gracious positive. 

T. T. MUNGEB. 

For thee, O dear, dear Country, 

Mine eyes their vigils keep ; 
For very love, beholding 

Thy happy name, they weep. 
Thou hast no shore, fair Ocean ! 

Thou hast no time^^ bright Day ! 
Dear fountain of refreshment 

To pilgrims far away! Saixt Bbrnaed. 

6 December. When I feel myself immortal 
without thinking of it, I clasp my hands, and 
sometimes I kneel and lay my forehead to the 
ground, worshiping God, because I am made to 
feel justly and holily and lovingly. And because 
I love along with God, along with God I am 
sure I shall live. And so every man I love 
makes me feel myself immortal. 

William Mountpord. 

I seek not of Thine Eden-land 
The forms and hues to know, — 

What trees in mystic order stand. 
What strange sweet waters flow ! 

Oh sweeter far to trust in Thee 
While all is yet unknown ; 



» 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 207 

And through the death-dark cheerily 
To walk with Thee alone ! Eliza Scudder. 

7 December. Certainly one of the strongest 
characteristics of our times has been a sensible 
diminishing of the attempt to realize the bless- 
edness of the occupations and the beauty of the 
landscapes of the other life, and an increase of 
the conviction that the essence of its happiness 
must be in holiness, and that the soul consecrated 
in holiness might well forget even to ask where 
it was to dwell and what it was to do forever. 

What " place " may mean in that other life we 
cannot even conjecture till we know something of 
the nature of the spiritual body in which we are 
to live ; and paint the place as definitely and as 
brilliantly as we will, still it would make it earth, 
not heaven, if it should be conceived of apart 
from spiritual fitnesses, as gratifying or satisfy- 
ing the soul of its inhabitant. 

" Ccdum patria^ Christus via^^ says the old 
motto : " Heaven the country, Christ the way/' 
But it is true that He who is the way is also the 
life into which the way leads ; and Christ must 

be country as well as path. Phillips Brooks. 

What is the heaven our God bestows ? 

No prophet yet, no angel knows. 

Was never yet created eye 

Could see across Eternity. Keble. 

8 December. Think not that Christ has 



208 BECKONINGS. 

come to give something distinct from virtue. 
Heaven is the freed and sanctified mind, enjoy- 
ing God through accordance with His attributes, 
multiplying its bonds and sympathies with excel- 
lent beings, putting forth noble powers, and min- 
istering, in union with the enlightened and holy, 
to the happiness and virtue of the universe. 

W. E. Channing. 

Let whosoever will, inquire 

Of spirit, or of seer. 
To shape unto the heart's desire 

The new life's vision clear. 
My God, I rather look to Thee 

Than to these fancies fond. 
And wait till Thou reveal to me 

That fair and far Beyond. 

Eliza Scuddbb. 

9 December. 

Still on the lips of all we question 

The finger of God's silence lies ; 
Will the lost hands in ours be folded ? 

Will the shut eyelids ever rise ? 
O friend ! no proof beyond this yearning, 

This outreach of our hearts, we need ; 
God will not mock the hope He giveth. 

No love He prompts shall vainly plead. 

J. G. Whtttier. 

If I cease to love those whom I once loved; 
if I cease to love them with a definite, positive, 
special love, I cease to be myself. 

Madame de Gasparin. 

10 December. Is the white tomb of our 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 209 

loved one, who died from our arms, and had to 
be left behind us there, which rises in the dis- 
tance like a pale mournfully receding milestone, 
to tell how many toilsome, uncheered miles we 
have journeyed on alone — but a pale, spectral 
illusion ? Is the lost friend still here, even as we 
are here mysteriously, with God ? Know of a 
truth that only the time-shadows have perished, 
or are perishable ; that the real being of what- 
ever is, and whatever will be, is even now and 

forever. Thomas Carlyle. 

11 December. I thank Thee, my God, that 
though the river of Lethe may indeed flow 
through the Elysian Fields, it does not water the 
Christian's Paradise. Madame de Gaspaein. 

Oh, Paradise must fairer be 

Than any spot below ! 
My spirit pines for liberty ; 

Now let me thither go ! 
In Paradise forever clear 

The stream of love is flowing : 
For every tear that I 've shed here, 

A pearl therein is glowing. 
All hopes, all wishes, all the love 

I longed for, tasted never, 
Shall bloom around me there above, 

And be with me forever. ruckert. 

12 December. Of all the ingredients that 
enter into that infinitely complex thing, a human 



210 BECKOXINGS. 

life ; of all the influences that radiate from it, 
and proclaim it there, none sm-ely are so essen- 
tial as the affections it kindles in others : and if 
beings around entertain of it a blessed and noble 
conception, are filled by it with generous aspira- 
tions, and feel the thought of it to be as a fire 
from heaven, in this is its true and best exist- 
ence ; in this consists its real identity, distinguish- 
ing it by strongest marks from other minds. 
And all this does death leave behind, as our 
indestructible possession. James Mabtd?eau. 

No seas again shall sever, 

No desert intervene ; 
No deep, sad-flowing river 

Shall roU its tide between. 
Love, and unsevered union 

Of soul with those we love, — 
Nearness and glad communion 

Shall be our joy above. H. Bonae. 

13 December. Our friends who leave us 
for that world do not find themselves cast among 
strangers. No desolate feeling springs up of 
having exchanged their home for a foreign coun- 
try. In that world, where minds have surer 
means of revealing themselves than here, the 
newly-arrived immediately see and feel them- 
selves encompassed with virtue and goodness ; 
and through this insight into the congenial spirits 
which surround them, intimacies stronger than 
years can cement on earth may be created in i; 
moment. w. e. CHA^-^-Ixa. 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 211 

Oh what is heaven but the fellowship 

Of minds that each can stand against the world 

By its own meek and incorruptible will. 

R. W. Emerson. 

14 December. ^'As touching the resurrection 
of the dead, have ye not read what was spoken 
to you by God^ saying, I am the God of Abra- 
ham, and IsaaCj and Jacob ? He is not the God 
of the dead, but of the living ; for all live unto 
Him:' 

What are all speculations about separate states 
and intermediate existences to this celestial sen- 
tence ? Those whom you read of in ages gone 
by, who sometimes stand out in such clear indi- 
viduality, who sometimes melt into shadows, all 
live ; for He lives from whom their life came. 
Nothing of it is departed, only the death which 
encompassed it. They have lost no personality. 
Here, there was but the first dawn of it. They 
were beginning feebly to be conscious of powers, 
to recognize distinctions, to feel after unity. 

He was educating their affections through the 
first stage of infancy, — their reason, in its strug- 
gles to know its object, — their will, in its endeav- 
ors to be obedient, — who is now bringing them 
into more wonderful affinities, infinitely deeper 
apprehensions, a perfect liberty. And what is 
true of them is true of all who have yielded to 
the same guidance, who have desired the same 
light. All live to Him, with not one sympathy 
impaired, or raised too high for human interests. 

F. D. Maurice. 



212 BECKONINGS. 

15 December. 

'T is but one family ! — the sound is balm ; 

A seraph-whisper to the wounded heart ; 
It lulls the storm of sorrow to a calm, 

And draws the venom from the avenger's dart. 
Death never separates ; the golden wires 

That ever trembled to their names before, 
Will vibrate still, though every form expires, 

And those we love we look uj^on no more. 
No more indeed in sorrow and in pain ; 

But even memory's need erelong will cease, 
For we shall join the lost we love again, 

In endless bonds and in eternal peace. 

Edmeston. 

16 December. We must not think of heaven 
as a stationary community. I think of it as a 
world of stupendous plans and efforts for its own 
improvement. In that world, as in this, there 
are diversities of intellect, and the highest minds 
find their happiness in elevating the less im- 
proved. There the work of education, which 
began here, goes on without end. 

And not only will they who are born into 
heaven enter a society full of Hfe and action for 
its own development. Heaven has connection 
with other worlds. Its inhabitants are God's 
messengers through the creation. They have 
great trusts. In the progress of their endless 
being, they may have the care of other worlds. 

W. E. Chaining. 

When the power of imparting joy 
Is equal to the will, the human soul 

Requires no other heaven. Shelley. 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 213 

17 December. All our better moods are 
prophetic of eternity for us. Justice feels itself 
rooted more deeply than the mountains are ; it is 
of the very essence of love to be consciously ever- 
lasting ; and faith feels as though it could die 
death after death, and only be the nigher God 
with every change. William Mountpord. 

Each hath his proper meed above, 

For actions nobly done ; 
But love that can another love 

Makes ever that her own ; 
Each hath his own peculiar good, 
But shared by the whole brotherhood. 

Peter Damianus. 

18 December. " Joy shall be in heaven over 
one sinner that repenteth."" How entirely Christ 
reverses the conceptions of heaven which those 
He was addressing entertained ! The highest 
joy they could think of was the joy of faring 
better than others — of winning prizes which 
others failed to win. The joy, He says, in 
heaven, is the joy of winning back those who 
have wandered ; of recovering those who have 
chosen the wrong way. There is no joy, he inti- 
mates, so heavenly, so much partaking of the 
Divine Nature, as this. F. D. Maueice. 

19 December. There are some whom I 
have known on earth, who are now departed 
from it, that I find it difficult to think of, even in 
heaven, under any other aspect than that of min- 



214 BECKONINGS. 

istering, welcoming, making every one around 
them comfortable ; though I know not what 
form their tender, ever active solicitude may 
take where there are none weary, or sick, or sor- 
rowful, where there are no strangers to be enter- 
tained, no wayfarers to be cheered and com- 
forted. Dora Geeenttell. 

Then was he made aware, by soul or ear, 
Of somewhat pure and holy bending o'er him, 
And of a voice like that of her who bore him, 
Tender and most compassionate : ^' Never fear ! 
For heaven is love, as God Himself is love ; 
Thy work below shall be thy work above." 

J. G. Whittebr. 

20 December. They who have gone before 
have not therefore passed into a condition of 
lethargy or vacancy. They may be nearer to us, 
as they are nearer to the perfect love. They 
may guide us towards a holier and ampler free- 
dom, since they suffer no more the limitations of 
time. The veil is rent. There is with us the 
presence of the unseen host. It is not alone 
their memory that remains ; their spirit may be 

with us. Elisha Mulford. 

Sweet souls around us, watch us still ! 

Press nearer to our side ! 
Into our thoughts, into our prayers, 

With gentle helpings glide ! 
Let death between us be as naught, — 

A dried and vanished stream : 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 215 

Your joy be the reality, 

Our suffering life the dream ! 

Mrs. H. B. Stowe. 

21 December. It is a beautiful connection, 
one whose mysterious beauty we are always 
learning more and more, that the deeper our 
spiritual experience of Christ becomes, the more 
our soul's life hangs on His life as its Saviour 
and continual Friend, the more real becomes to 
us the unquenched life of those who have gone 
from us to be with Him. In those moments 
when Christ is most real to me, when He lives in 
the centre of my desires, and I am resting most 
heavily upon His help, in those moments I am 
surest that the dead are not lost, — that those 
whom this Christ in whom I trust has taken, He 
is keeping. The more He lives to me, the more 

they live. Phillips Brooks. 

Some sweet morning yet in God's 

Dim, seonian periods, 

Joyful I shall wake to see 

Those I love who rest in Thee ; 

And to them in Thee allied 

Shall my soul be satisfied. J. G. Whittier. 

22 December. You know that on earth we 
sometimes meet human beings, whose counte- 
nances at the first view scatter all distrust, and 
win from us something like the reliance of a 
long-tried friendship. One smile is enough to 
let us into their hearts, to reveal to us a good- 



216 BECKOXINGS. 

ness on which we may repose. That smile with 
which Jesus will meet the new-born inhabitant of 
heaven, that joyful greeting, that beaming of 
love from Him who bled for us, that tone of 
welcome, — all these I can faintly conceive, but 
no language can utter them. The joys of centu- 
ries will be crowded into that meeting. 

W. E. CHA^-I^TNG. 

O not of star or flower is born 

The beauty of that shore ! 
There is a Face which you shall see, 

And wish for nothing more. 

M. B. Smedley. 

23 December. 

I sit alone and watch the darkening years, 

And all my heart grows dim with doubt and 
fear, 
Till out of deepest gloom a Face appears ; 

The only one of all that shineth clear. 
Make white thy wedding-garments, my soul ! 

And sigh no longer for thy scanty dower; 
For if He loves thee. He will crown the whole 

With nobler beauty and immortal power. 

mighty Angel of the secret name ! 

Come, for my heart doth answer thy All-hail : 

1 know thy clasp is like a wind of flame ; 

I know that I shaU perish, yet prevail. 
Come with the new name and the mystic stone, 
And speak so low that none shall hear the 
call. — 
O beautiful, beloved, and still unknown, 

I ask Thee naught : — Thy look hath prom- 
ised all! Carl Spencer. 



I 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 217 

24 December. Christmas Eve, Christ is 
not the monopoly of any nation, or creed. All lit- 
erature, all science, all philosophy, every doctrine 
that is true, every form of righteousness, every 
virtue that belongs to the Son, is the true subjec- 
tive Christ whom all ages glorify. Scattered in 
all schools of philosophy and in all religious sects, 
scattered in all men and women of the East and 
the West, are multitudinous Christ-principles and 
fragments of Christ-life, one vast and identical 
Sonship diversely manifested. Keshub Chundee Sen. 

Lend, once again, that holy song a tongue. 
Which the glad angels of the Advent sung ; — 
Their cradle-anthem for the Saviour's birth : 
" Glory to God, and peace unto the earth ! " 

J. G. Whittier. 

25 December. Christmas. 

Heart beats to heart, friend smiles on friend, 

Across the sea the nations call, 
" Peace and good-will, good-will and peace, 

In His dear name who loves us all ! " 

Mrs. H. B. Stowb. 

Wonderful ! round whose birth-hour 
Prophetic Song, miraculous power. 
Cluster and hum, like star and flower ! 
The secret of the years is read. 
The enigma of the quick and dead 
By the Child- Voice interpreted. 

W. Alexander. 

When Christmas comes, we hear again the word 
Our Lord spake, listening back to His own 
birth, 



218 BEGKOmXGS. 

And forward nntiiliiow, as if He heard 

His adrent hymned by all : 2. — 

" ^Except as little children ye : c : : _= , 
Ye cannot ia God's kingdom he at home." 

When Christmas comes, set in Ihe midst is He, 
The Eternal Child, to show men they must be 
As :L: tI still, woald tiiey His kingdom see. 

26 December. Mv r:i-;.;i says God sends 
C:iii : i-:: :^r "::. . 2: : tLti :e Christ is not 

Go;.. I: St 7:1:^ :: vir i<i otherwise. God sends 
CL::-: ;^-.;-: ,:r::.v.— Cnrist is God. H- — ::;".^ 
HiintTif, E:^ ^eiiiiin^ is :. comings Tiiir i- :::e 

nira-i::. 0: rii- -:-:2--::: :::Ie of our Mas:e:-, He 



Srrong Son of God, immortal LoTe, 

TThom vre. that hare not seen Thy face, 
B : " - - Tn alone, embrace, 

Be H e n: ^ " : t z ~ r c annot prove ; — 

Thou seemest hmnan and divine ; 
The highest. hoKest manhood, Tlicm : 

Our -^ihs are ours, ^e im:'" :::: how; 
O'lLT wihs are ours, to makr :Lr:n Thine. 

27 December. A mediator be:-rz._. j _ .1 
an i n; n :nn: he niething like to G h ^ n:e- 
nn, InT n n n '^uig in n 

mii.^ nr ,L.y:.::. :. , m God ; c_. .. :. 

like God, too unlike man. and s a medi- 

ator. iAT r AT 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 219 

For all grows sweet in Thee, 
Since Thou didst gather us in One, and bring 
This fading flower of our humanity 
To perfect blossoming. 
All comes to bloom ! This wild 
Green outward world of ours, that still must wear 
The furrow on its brow, by print of care 
And toil struck deep ; this world by sin made 

sad. 
Hath felfc Thy foot upon its sod, and smiled ; 

The desert place is glad ! Dora Greenwell. 

28 December The character of Jesus is not 
a fiction ; He was what He claimed to be, and 
what His followers attested. Nor is this all. 
Jesus not only was^ He is still the Son of God, 
the Saviour of the world. He exists now. He 
has entered that heaven to which He always 
looked forward on earth. There He lives and 
reigns. With a clear, calm faith, I see Him in 
that state of glory ; and I confidently expect, at 
no distant period, to see Him face to face. We 
have indeed no absent friend whom we shall so 
surely meet. w. e. Channing. 

O God, O Kinsman loved, but not enough ! 

O man, with eyes majestic after death, 
Whose feet have toiled along our pathways 
rough, 
Whose lips drawn human breath ! 
By that one likeness which is ours and Thine, — 
By that one nature which doth make us kin, — 



220 BECKONINGS. 

By that high heaven where, sinless, Thou dost 
shine 
To draw us sinners in, — 
Come I lest this heart should, cold and cast away, 

Die ere the Guest adored she entertain, — 
Lest eyes which never saw thine earthly day 
Should miss Thy heavenly reign ! 

Jean Ingelow. 

29 December. To discern that which is 
" before and after," has been pronounced the great 
human prerogative : but to see clearly that which 
is within^ is the Divine, And this was Christ's ; 
the source of that majestic power by which, as 
the hierophant and interpreter of the God-like 
in the soul, He uttered everlasting oracles. He 
penetrated through the film to the inner mystery 
and silence of our nature : and when He spake, 
an instant music — as of a minster organ touched 
by spirits at midnight — thrilled and made a low 
chant within. Oh, when speech is given to a 
soul holy and true as His, Time, and its dome of 
ages, becomes as a mighty whispering - gallery, 
round which the im]3risoned utterance runs and 
reverberates forever ! His awful vows in the 
wilderness, the mournful breathings of Olivet, 
the mellow voice that led the hymn at the Last 
Supper, the faint cries of Calvary, the solemn 
assurance that heaven and God dwell in us, — 
do they not ring and vibrate in our hearts unto 

this day ? James Martineau. 

30 December. Christ has broken down the 



WITHIN THE VEIL. 221 

barriers of the grave. He has opened the king- 
dom of heaven, that the earth and the heavens 
may become thenceforth one in their life. The 
grave has no victory in its corruption. It bears 
us on to the perfect life, the life of those who 
have loved righteousness^, the life of those who 
have cast o£E the garments of their own vanity 
and selfishness, and entered into the life of Him 
who is the Redeemer of the world. 

It is the new life, — the life of the fulfillment 
of the spirit ; it is the life of humanity. It fulfills 
the hope of man ; it is beyond all that was pre- 
figured in the prophetic soul of the wide world. 

Elisha Mulpord. 

31 December. In the vast heavens, as well 
as among phenomena around us, all things are 
in a state of change and progress. There, too, 
— on the sky, — in splendid hieroglyphics, the 
truth is inscribed, that the grandest forms of 
present Being are only germs swelling and burst- 
ing with a life to come ! — To come ! To every 
creature these are words of hope spoken in 
organ tone: our hearts suggest them, and the 
stars repeat them ; and through the Infinite, As- 
piration wings its way rejoicingly, as an eagle 
following the sun. j. p. nichol. 

Forever ! though who shall tell in what seem- 
ing, or where ? 

In what far-off secret space of God's limitless 
air? 

It matters nothing at all what we are, or where 
set, 



222 BECKONIXGS. 

If a spark of the Infinite Light can shine on us 
yet; 
Life following Life forever ! 

Life following Life forever I for what if the Sun 
Grew chilled, and the universe cold, and the 

orbits undone, 
And all the great globes should fall back into 

chaos once more? 
They would wake at a glance of the Light, as 

they wakened before : 
There is no Death forever ! 

Edwds Morris. 



INDEX. 



Agassiz, Louis, 185. 
Aird, Thomas, 146. 
Alexander, W., 217. 
Alford, Henry, 19. 
Angelus Silesius, 100. 
Arnold, Edwin, 150, 200. 
Arnold, Matthew, 60, 119, 149. 
Ashe, T., 29, 75. 

Augustine, St., 82, 120, 126, 161, 
178, 218. 

Bailey, P. J., 13, 142, 173. 

Barbauld, A. L., 205. 

Bernard, St., 72, 206. 

Bickford, L. B., 127. 

Blackie, J. S., 155, 185. 

Bolton, 191. 

Bonar, Horatio, 197, 210. 

Brooks, Phillips, 9, 11, 18, 21, 25, 
26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 52, 55, 81, 89, 
90, 97, 130, 141, 153, 154, 162, 
169, 178, 184, 191, 207, 215, 218. 

Browning, E. B., 28, 37, 38, 51, 
80, 100, 110, 126, 174, 199. 

Browning, Robert, 65, 66, 73, 86. 

Burns, Robert, 102. 

Bushnell, Horace, 12, 33, 60, 64, 
84, 99, 165, 196. 

Bryant, W. C, 20, 80, 89, 132, 
172. 

Campbell, Thomas, 137. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 19, 26, 27, 68, 

73, 81, 91, 121, 123, 124, 125, 

126, 132, 161, 169, 172, 209. 
Gary, Alice, 78, 104, 198. 
Gary, Phoebe, 197. 
Ghanning, Dr. W. E., 116, 138, 

208, 210. 
Ghanning, W. E., 198. 
Gharles, Mrs., 99. 
Clough, A. H., 42, 57, 86, 163. 
Gobbe, Frances Power, 87, 103, 

186. 
Goleridge, Hartley, 185, 



Coleridge, S. T., 6, 12, 25, 49, 61, 
64, 70, 80, 122, 131, 173, 192. 

Conder, Josiah, 22. 

Cooke, Rose Terry, 49. 

Goolbrith, Ina D., 101. 

Coolidge, Susan, 35, 77. 

Cowper, William, 17, 61, 111, 115, 
160, 170, 172. 

Damianus, Peter, 213. 

Dante, 21, 178. 

Davies, Sir John, 10. 

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 69. 

Derzhavin, 10. 

De Stael, 160, 172. 

De Vere, Aubrey, 116, 170. 

Dobell, S., 107. 

Drummond, Henry, 8, 170, 195, 

204. 
Dwigiit, J. S., 38. 

Edmeston, James, 212. 

Eliot, George, 43, 46, 52, 55, 73, 

90, 145. 

Emerson, R. W., 20, 23, 42, 43, 
45, 51, 57, 71, 72, 82, 114, 116, 
117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 
138, 144, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156, 
162, 169, 171, 185, 211. 

Epictetus, 13, 52, 74. 

Erskine, 192. 

Faber, F. W., 15, 73, 179. 
F^nelon, 17, 28, 35, 160, 187. 
Fichte, 9, 199. 
Fletcher, John, 180. 
Freemantle, W. H., 43, 46, 56, 63, 

91, 101, 177, 190. 

Gannett, W. G., 8, 63, 109, 144, 

159. 
Garrett, Edward, 25, 137. 
Gasparin, Madame de, 59, 86, 105, 

131, 134, 163, 208, 209. 
Gilbert, I. C., 141. 



224 



INDEX. 



GiU, T. H., 35, 67, 130, 134. 
Goethe, 25, 29, 30, 62, 80, 100, 171, 

173, 174, 175, 205. 
Greenwell, Dora, 47, 50, 51, 68, 

72, 79, 106, 121, 122, 141, 159, 

186, 193, 205, 214, 219. 

HaU, Bishop, 73. 

HaUam, A. H., 149, 163. 

Hamilton, Sir, W. R., 16. 

Hare, 81, 83. 

Havergal, F. R., 133, 135, 143. 

Hegel, 193. 

Herbert, Edward, 162. 

Herbert, George, 28, 43, 51, 62, 

80, 83, 111, 139. 
Hooper, Mrs., 24. 
Hosmer, F. L., 19. 
Hughes, Thomas, 150. 
Hugo, Victor, 81, 149, 205. 

Ingelow, Jean, 30, 31, 36, 119, 220. 

Jonson, Ben, 71. 

Joubert, 11, 67, 80, 84, 104, 123, 
170, 172, 174. 

Keats, John, 104, 118. 
Keble, John, 15, 53, 85, 207. 
Kempis, Thomas a, 71, 82, 161, 

190. 
Kingsley, Charles, 15, 44, 46, 67, 

98, 120, 169, 178. 

Lacon, 45, 71. 

Landor, W. S., 137. 

Leighton, Archbishop, 83, 173, 

176. 
Leighton, Robert, 12, 84, 140, 156. 
LongfeUow, H, W., 11, 78,91,97, 

199. 
Lowell, J. R., 8, 11, 26, 27, 54, 

88, 103, 105, 108, 124, 126, 144, 

152, 180. 

MacDonald, George, 14, 15, 18, 44, 
53, 56, 62, 66, 67, 78, 89, 109, 
114, 119, 125, 137, 143, 153, 166, 
192. 

Marcus Aurelius, 69, 117, 137, 196. 

Martineau, James, 9, 10, 30, 70, 
127, 138, 139, 195, 205, 210, 220. 

Massey, Gerald, 115, 136. 

Maurice, F. D., 38, 48, 50, 53, 54, 
74, 155, 164, ISO, 181, 187, 188, 
211, 213. 

Meredith, Owen, 36, 55, 101. 

Mill, J. S., 81. 



MUton, John, 37, 72, 126, 144, 

165, 179. 
Monkhouse, C, 157. 
Montgomery, James, 11. 
Moore, Henry, 13, 72, 154. 
Morris, Edwin, 6, 21, 27, 63, 92, 

146, 184, 222. 
Morris, L., 171. 
Moimtford, William, 100, 102, 

121, 138, 140, 143, 189, 197, 206, 
213. 

Mozoomdar, P. C, 12, 37, 104, 

189 
Mulford, Elisha, 64, 194, 204, 214, 

221. 
Miiller, Max, 77. 
Munger, T. T., 10, 11, 90, 198, 

204, 206. 

Newman, F. W., 16, 67, 74. 
Newman, J. H., 106. 
Newlon, John, 29. 
Nichol, J. P., 179, 221. 
Nicoll, Robert, 7. 
Norris, Alfred, 33, 200. 
Novahs, 69, 169, 176. 

Osgood, Frances S., 31. 

Parker, H. W., 107. 
i Parker, Theodore, 29, 32, 100. 
Peabody, W. O. B., 175, 177. 
Phelps, Austm, 14, 36. 
Phelps, E. S., 161. 
Procter, Adelaide A., 56, 145. 

Robertson, F. W., 13, 15, 20, 32, 

57, 92, 111, 128, 157, 175, 179, 

193, 196. 
Ruckert, 209. 
Ruskin, John, 20, 27, 41, 42, 54, 

56, 60, 65, 68, 97, 130, 135, 156, 

165, 180, 194. 

Saadi, 83. 

Schefer, Leopold, 199. 

Schiller, Frederick von, 85, 150, 

154. 
Scudder, Eliza, 18, 112, 207, 208. 
Sears, E. H., 144, 171, 193. 
Sen, Keshub Chunder, 155, 184, 

317. 
Seneca, 82. 

Sewall, Harriet W., 45. 
Shairp, J. C, 30, 61, 66, 99, 117, 

122, 123, 124. 
Shakespeare, William, 37, 57, 

107. 



INDEX. 



225 



Shelley, P. B., 114, 119, 150, 162, 

212. 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 35, 153, 158. 
Smedley, M. B., 216. 
Smith, Alexander, 123. 
Smith, Horace, 103. 
Smith, Sydney, 86. 
Southey, Robert, 152. 
Spencer, Carl, 216. 
Spenser, Edmund, 121. 
Stanley, Dean, 43, 49, 50, 87, 115, 

128, 140, 170, 175, 176. 
Sterling, John, 24, 106, 174. 
Story, W. W., 125, 145. 
Stowe, H. B., 84, 87, 98, 190, 215, 

218. 
Sutton, H. S., 90, 180. 
Swedenborg, 170. 

Tauler, John, 17, 27, 152, 190. 
Taylor, Jeremy, 86, 87, 151. 



Tennyson, Alfred, 93, 102, 156, 

164, 176, 178, 188, 204, 218. 
Thorn, J. H., 150. 
Thoreau, H. D., 72, 158. 
Trench, R. C, 73, 90. 

Vaughan, Henry, 78. 

Very, Jones, 17, 77, 109, 143. 

Ware, Henry, Jr., 98, 124. 
Waring, A. L., 14, 49, 115, 120. 
Wasson, D. A., 157, 198. 
Whittier, J. G., 25, 31, 44, 45, 52, 

74, 89, 117, 132, 162, 184, 192, 

194, 195, 208, 214, 215, 217. 
Williams, Sarah, 85. 
Willis, N. P., 42, 51. 
Wordsworth, William, 31, 37, 41, 

46, 51, 59, 70, 72, 97, 104, 118, 

133, 142, 160, 174, 175. 



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a series of stimulating and consoling thoughts for the 
whole course of the year. 

Calculated to give strength and comfort to a wide circle, and to in- 
crease the poet's admirers, — Tlie Nation (New York). 

Very pretty, very cleverly done, and a success of which the au- 
thoress may be proud. — The Churchman (New York). 



ARTISTIC CALENDARS FOR 1887. 

Compiled from the Works of Browning and Haw- 
thorne, and also from Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, 
Lowell, Mrs. Whitney and Whittier. Giving the day 
of the week upon which each day of the year will fall, 
the consecutive number of each day of the year, the 
days on which the moon is new and full, the anniver- 
saries of noted events and of the birth of famous 
men, and the great ecclesiastical and civil days, to- 
gether with choice passages from the writings of an 
author of renown, and practical information respect- 
ing rates of postage, and measures of length, weight, 
and capacity. 

Each, mounted on card, tastefully decorated in 
colors, 50 cents. 

*^* For sale hy all Booksellers. Sent hy mail, post-paid, 
on receipt of price hy the Publishers, 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
Boston and New York. 



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